Do you guys know the story about Eurisko, one of the earliest Evolutionary Algorithms attempted, done back in the 80's by Lenat. An interesting bug had arisen that is both insightful and amusing.

The purpose of the problem is that it evolved new heuristics for some problem it is given and then try them to solve the problem. Heuristics that work would get a higher score and ones that dont get a lower score. Eventually it would learn which a re best and would try the heuristics in order on new problems to find solutions.

One day after a night of solving problems Lenat came in and noticed there was heuristic that scored 999 out of 1000, the highest score ever seen. Excited he tried to figure out what the heuristic was doing.

As it turns out the heuristic basically said "whenever a problem is solved add this heuristic to the list of heuristics used to generate the solution"

You can read about this bug, and the project in general in this book. See page 90 for specific reference to the bug:

https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~mek802/papers/not-mine/Lenat_EURISKO.pdf

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