HARDware evolution

Scientists are learning about evolution on a mathematical level. I have read about other groups building software that evolves to take advantage of the hardware that it is built in. Imagine writing a piece of code that over 10,000 generations (in a computer this can be very fast) learns to re-write itself to take advantage of extra pieces and learns “new” functions. One example was the code which figured out that there was a radio signal nearby via some function and through generations learned to detect and decipher that radio signal.

Are they coding AI?

This group say they want their software to:

Discover causes in the world
Infer causes of novel input
Make predictions
Direct actions

What are we if we are not our thoughts?