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I promise this isn't a "OMG, AI!" question. But it involves kinda that thing.
A long time ago--probably over 15 years--I once read an article about some sort of..."evolved"?...method of generating novel antenna designs. Basically, the article said that the researchers said they had an algorithm or computer "evolve" some potential designs, and it spat out this really weird unintuitive design that was nothing like the human made designs. But it ended up working fantastically well or something when they actually prototyped it and tried it?
Any knowledge/thoughts on that sort of thing?
Not the person you were responding to, but I'm knowledgeable on the topic. What you're describing is simulated evolution, and it can (and has!) been used to make anything from antennas to spray nozzles to mixer blades. Basically, you start with one or multiple base designs, then slowly alter parameters about the design (for antennas, this could be length, number of loops, loop direction, etc., or it could be more granular, like starting from a stump and extending or branching in random directions).
You generally have a group of candidate designs, called a "generation", then randomly select from these designs, weighted towards the ones which perform better, and "kill" the underperforming ones. Then you make random mutations on the remaining members of the old generation to create a new generation. Continue until you have generations that are performing better than your current manual designs, if the evolution manages to reach that point.
There are additional things you can do to solve certain issues the evolutionary process might run into, like taking the parameters for your new generation from two parents instead of one (essentially, this goes from single-celled mitosis to sexual reproduction, and can allow two different evolutionary lines to share their progress).
Also not the person you're asking, but I was reading about this yesterday so: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna