A perfect score

“One algorithm was supposed to figure out how to land a virtual airplane with minimal force. But the AI soon discovered that if it crashed the plane, the program would register a force so large that it would overwhelm its own memory and count it as a perfect score. So the AI crashed the plane, over and over again, presumably killing all the virtual people on board.”

The Spooky Genius of Artificial Intelligence, by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 28 September 2018. Thompson's article is based on the paper The surprising creativity of digital evolution: a collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities (14 August 2018) and Can Artificial Intelligence Be Smarter Than a Human Being?, an episode of the Crazy/Genius podcast by Kasia Mychajlowycz and Patricia Yacob.