If, many decades from now, some form of rogue artificial intelligence does manage to follow the playbook of a thousand science-fiction narratives and enslave the human race, I suspect the last remaining historians will look back to an obscure computer science experiment conducted at the turn of this century as an augur of the revolution to come. The experiment was the brainchild of two researchers at the University of Sussex named Jon Bird and Paul Layzell, and it involved a programming technique known as “evolutionary” software that uses a kind of simulated version of natural selection to engineer and optimize solutions to a design problem.

Bird and Layzell wanted to see if they could harness the creativity of natural selection to design an oscillator, one of the key building blocks of modern electronics. (Oscillators output a repetitive signal that is used in everything from the clocks that coordinate activity inside a computer’s CPU to the sounds of synthesized music.) The Sussex researchers created a kind of virtual genome made up of transistors, and used the software to randomly explore possible connections between those transistors, simulating the random explorations of genetic mutation that drive so much of evolutionary change. Configurations that produced outputs that were closer to the rhythmic pulse of a oscillator were selected and then used as the basis for the next round of mutations.

After many generational cycles, Bird and Layzell’s creation settled on a reliable sine wave, creating a signal that was more or less indistinguishable from that of an oscillator designed by human engineers. But when the two scientists examined their contraption, they discovered something very puzzling: There was no evidence of an actual oscillating circuit in the transistors themselves. The system was outputting an oscillating signal, but there wasn’t anything on the circuit board that suggested how the system was creating that signal.

Eventually, Bird and Layzell discovered, to their astonishment, that the mysterious oscillation was not being generated by the transistors, but rather by other computers in the room whose clock cycles were emitting periodic radio waves timed to their own oscillators. Instead of building an oscillator of its own, Bird and Layzell’s creation had hijacked the rhythmic signals being generated by its neighbors.

This was startling enough, but there was a further, even more baffling twist: the “genome” of transistors that they began with did not include a radio antenna. There didn’t seem to be any way for the evolved system to “hear” the signals emanating from the other machines. This required even more detective work. In the end, they discovered that the software had stumbled across the strategy of employing the printed circuit board tracks as an antenna, picking up an extremely faint signal from the surrounding machines, which was then amplified by the transistors.

Bird and Layzell had designed their evolutionary software to select for the production of an oscillating signal, which naturally led them to assume that their creation would set about to build an oscillator. Instead, it took another route. It built a radio.