Designing Coins with Evolutionary Computation

In recent years, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for creative and artistic endeavours has attracted considerable attention, increasing the opportunities to use AI for many art and design tasks. This paper describes our response to a unique challenge presented by the Portuguese National Press-Mint (INCM): to use AI to design a commemorative coin that celebrates the "digital world". We explain the process of this coin's co-creation, from conceptualisation to production, highlighting the design process, key obstacles encountered, and technical innovations made to meet the challenge. These include developing an evolutionary art system guided by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) and Machine Learning (ML)-based aesthetic models, a system for prompt evolution, and a representation for encoding genotypes in mintable format. This collaboration produced a limited edition 10 euro silver proof coin (Figure 1), with a total of 4,000 units minted by the National Press-Mint. The coin was met with enthusiasm, selling out within two months. This work contributes to Computational Creativity (CC), particularly co-creativity, co-design, and digital art, and represents a significant step in using AI for Numismatics.