The story behind Picbreeder
The story of this book really began when our research group decided to build a website called Picbreeder that was also a unique kind of scientific experiment. At first, the idea behind Picbreeder had little clear connection to objectives. In fact, it was originally conceived as a place where visitors could literally breed pictures. While that may not make sense when you first hear it, it’s actually a simple idea. The plan was to make it work roughly like animal breeding: Pictures on the site would be able to have “children” that are slightly different from their parents (just as animals have children that are unique but still clearly related to their parents). The hope was that by allowing visitors to breed the pictures they find most interesting, over time they would end up breeding works of art that please them, even if the visitors themselves were not artists.
See Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Kenneth O. Stanley - Novel Opportunities in Open-Endedness at UCL DARK, Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning - The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis, etc. for takeaways / conclusions.