[joek1301]

Yet another similar story. A side project of mine was building a rudimentary neural network whose weights were optimized via a genetic algorithm. The goal was operating top-down, 2D self-driving cars.

The cars' "fitness" function rewarded cars for driving along the course and punished them for crashing into walls. But evidently this function punished a little too severely: the most successful cars would just drive in tight circles and never make progress on the course. But they were sure to avoid walls. :)