I have a friend who observed similar emergent behavior in an a-life (gene-based from what I understand) simulation he created, in an environment of "tanks in a maze" (or something like that).<p>The "genes" consisted a simplified assembler (run on a VM) that could describe a program the tank would use to control itself - it could sense other tanks within line-of-sight to a certain degree, it could sense walls, it could fire its cannon, move in a particular direction, sense when another tank had a bearing (cannon pointed) on itself, etc.<p>He set up 100 random tanks (with random "genes"/programs) and let the simulation run. Top scorers (who had the most kills) would be used to seed the next "generation", using a form of sexual "mating" and (pseudo-) random mutation. Then that generation would run.<p>He said he ran the simulation for days at a time. One day he noticed something odd. He started to notice that certain tanks had "evolved" the means to "teleport" from location to location on the map. He didn't design this possibility in - what had happened was (he later determined) that a bug he had left in the VM was being exploited to allow the tanks to instantaneously move within their environment. He thought it was interesting, so he left it as-is and let the simulation continue.<p>After a long period of running, my friend then noticed something very odd. Some tanks were "wiggling" their turrets - other tanks would "wiggle" in a similar fashion. After a while all he could deduce was that in some manner, they were communicating with each other, similar to "bee dancing", and starting to form factions against each other...<p>...it was at that point he decided things were getting much too strange, and he stopped the experiment.<p>Sadly, he no longer has a copy of this software, but I believe his story, simply because I have seen quite a bit of other code and have worked closely with him on various projects since (as an adult) to know that such a system was well within his capability of creating.<p>At the time, he was probably only 16 or 17 years old, the computer was a 386, and this was sometime in the early 1990s. I believe the software was likely a combination of QuickBasic 4.5 and 8086 assembler running under DOS, as that was his preferred environment at the time.<p>I've often considered recreating the experiment, using today's technology, just to see what would happen (at the time he related this to me, as an adult, he asked me how difficult it would be to make a more physical version of this "game"; I'm still not sure if he meant scale model tanks, or full-sized - knowing him, though, he would have loved to play with the latter).