I read more than one article within the last thirty months about an
experiment in which researchers linked several software processes
together, gave them basic semantic structures, and let them evolve
their own shared vocabularies for functional expression.  The
computers created an evolving lexicon, and the researchers began
figuring out what the entries corresponded to in human terms.

The unusual thing was: for a few 'words', the researchers couldn't
puzzle out any expressible meaning.

Now I can't find even one of the articles, and it hurts.

I need a working url to at least one of the articles (or Google's
cache of it:).

Hi, jonathanweaver-ga:

Thanks for posting this very interesting question.  I was unable to
find the article, but as is often the case my search itself was
educational.

Is there perhaps another keyword that you can recall from the article?
 A location, conference name, etc. ?

Perhaps you'd be interested (as I was) in this "constructed languages
(conlang) FAQ portal:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/9219/conlang.html

regards, mathtalk-ga

Easy enough to answer.  Here is one link:

http://bulletin.ninemsn.com.au/bulletin/eddesk.nsf/All/9BF1D86B7C882797CA256A0D001E2F19?OpenDocument

Here is another:

http://www.generation5.org/archives/0201.shtml

The original article seems to have been at feedmag but the link is
broken:

http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1626

cool stuff!  I should be getting paid for this :)

by the way I found my answers using the following Google searches:

1.  computers evolve language
2.  software agents that evolve language feedmag

With the first one I got this link:
http://www.tecsoc.org/innovate/innovate.htm and on that page found
information leading me to use the 2nd search.

A link to a detailed description of an experiment similar to the one
that probably produced the interesting results:

http://uk.geocities.com/neilcarrott/design.htm

Here's a link to the article that was a broken link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011004051145/http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1626