The fundamental problem is that the stepping stones that lead to the objective may not resemble the objective itself.
— Novelty Search and the Problem with Objectives
Contrary to intuition, searching without regard to the objective can often outperform searching explicitly for the objective.
— Novelty Search and the Problem with Objectives
natural evolution succeeds because it divergently explores many ways of life while optimizing a behavior (i.e. reproduction) largely orthogonal to what is interesting about its discoveries, while objective-based search directly follows the gradient of improvement until it either succeeds or is too far deceived
— Novelty Search and the Problem with Objectives
I found out a couple of interesting things. First of all, magic lenses are fun to use, and feel distinctively different to what most of the computing is like right now. Because the transformations are pure functions (they don't destroy the underlying material, just like a physical lens wouldn't), you can experiment without any fear of losing the original data. You also often get unexpected results, which is great for Novelty Search.
the evolution of mathematics, art, and technology are facilitated by exploration around recent discoveries, serendipity, and a plethora of diverse and conflicting individual objectives. That is, these human-driven processes of search also do not aim at any unified society-wide singular objective. Thus the types of search processes that continually innovate to produce radical advancements often lack a final predefined goal. This observation makes sense because a single fixed goal would either (1) be deceptive and therefore bring search to a point at which progress would effectively halt, or (2) if the goal is not so deceptive then innovation would cease once the goal is met.
— Novelty Search and the Problem with Objectives
innovation may result more from accumulating novel ways of life (i.e. new niches) than from optimizing fitness
— Novelty Search and the Problem with Objectives