In their paper Antoine Cully and and Jean-Baptiste Mouret of the Sorbonne in Paris and Jeff Clune of the University of Wyoming describe how their algorithm allows a robot to adapt to damage in under two minutes.
This, they say, is ‘thanks to intuitions that they develop before their mission and experiments that they conduct to validate or invalidate them after damage. The result is a creative process that adapts to a variety of injuries, including damaged, broken, and missing legs.’
September 1935: Class A4 locomotive enters service
And your last sentence continues to this day!