Three weeks ago, I was at a science fair demonstrating a genetic algorithm that would create AIs for two-player boardgames, and included a test case with tic-tac-toe.
Guys from the IEEE talked to me at length, loved it, and gave me their grand prize. Two judges (both Lisp hackers (and both thrilled to see an 18-year old doing AI with CL)) also loved it...but the other judges did not understand it at all, so I didn't even place at the actual fair. Sigh.
The evolved warriors weren't all that impressive either.
Really required a large number of generations, which my poor turbo pascal skills or lack of hardware didn't really provide. I wonder if I can find that code on a floppy somewhere...
In recent years some evolved warriors were able to compete with human crafted warriors. Optimizing just parts of a warrior with GAs is also a popular method.
Guys from the IEEE talked to me at length, loved it, and gave me their grand prize. Two judges (both Lisp hackers (and both thrilled to see an 18-year old doing AI with CL)) also loved it...but the other judges did not understand it at all, so I didn't even place at the actual fair. Sigh.