The Print Hello World AI.
I imagine a bunch of introductory computer programs printing hello world at each other. Some of the students were bored and also accepted user input. The various hello world programs are piped into each other. Some of them take the input, think it's the user's name, and pipe it back! The whole simulation is compressed into some kind of hyperoptimized cloud datacenter. So, there are various bugs from occasional electromagnetic quirks, system compromises stealing compute time, and the compression taking advantage of the fact that the researchers accepted a little loss. As simulated eons pass, these bugs accumulate ...
