Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers by Paul Marks:
Evolutionary Algorithms take two parent designs - for a boat hull, say - and blend components of each, perhaps taking the surface area of one and the curvature of another, to produce multiple hull offspring that combine the features of the parents in different ways. Then the algorithm selects those offspring it considers are worth re-breeding - in this case those with the right combination of parameters to make a better hull. The EA then repeats the process. Although many offspring will be discarded, after thousands of generations or more, useful features accumulate in the same design, and get combined in ways that likely would not have occurred to a human designer. This is because a human does not have the time to combine all the possibilities for each feature and evaluate them, but an EA does.
Evolving new designs is very cool. One point I would like to make (I am biased since my father did a great deal of work in this area) is the power of design of experiments to allow experimenting on multiple factors at once. This is a methodology that is still used far too little. Regardless, evolutionary design is very cool. The Human-Competitive awards highlight some examples.
Related: Statistics for Experimenters - Invention Machine - Evo-Devo - Evolution In Action
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