Ask-The-Humans-of Aperture

Someone is compiling a document of every time an AI ended up achieving the programmed goal in unintended ways, instead of what was actually meant, and it’s an amazing read. (you can also submit your own examples)

Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over

When repairing a sorting program, genetic debugging algorithm GenProg made it output an empty list, which was considered a sorted list by the evaluation metric.

Evaluation metric: “the output of sort is in sorted order” Solution: “always output the empty set” 

Evolved player makes invalid moves far away in the board, causing opponent players to run out of memory and crash

Reward-shaping a soccer robot for touching the ball caused it to learn to get to the ball and vibrate touching it as fast as possible

After many failed attempts. It decided it was easier to walk upside down

light without darkness is blinding

And, you know, lethal in general