This reminds me of two early examples of evolutionary AI design (though I doubt I could find the details, these are from interviews long ago: one was a circuit board that an AI designed which looked non-fictional and that no human would have designed, but it worked. Best guess was the EM of one part was interacting with another.

The other is some guys who were trying to build the lightest possible body for a drone, and set an AI to building it. They 3D printed it and when their buddy who was a veterinarian walked in he said "hey, why do you have a flying squirrel skeleton here?" AI doing what natural selection took millions of years to, running through the iterations in milliseconds rather than generations.