As Charles Darwin wrote in at the end of his seminal 1859 book On the Origin of the Species, "whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Scientists have since long believed that the diversity and range of forms of life on Earth provide evidence that biological evolution spontaneously innovates in an open-ended way, constantly inventing new things. However, attempts to construct artificial simulations of evolutionary systems tend to run into limits in the complexity and novelty which they can produce. This is sometimes referred to as "the problem of open-endedness." Because of this difficulty, to date, scientists can't easily make artificial systems capable of exhibiting the richness and diversity of biological systems.
* This article was originally published here
