Absolutely, I remember an article from ages ago about a self learning algo implemented on an fpga (I think) that could modify its own make up on a hardware level.

It ended up optimising in a way that wasn't obvious at first, but turned out to be the noise of one part interacting with another.

Aha: Here's the paper https://osmarks.net/assets/misc/evolved-circuit.pdf

And a fluff article https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits

And as per usual, Google was hopeless in finding the article from a rough description. No chance, at all. Chatgpt thought for 10s and delivered the correct result, first time.