[mcphage]

I wonder as well; I was really interested in it back when I was in college, but that was like 15 years ago, and it seems that the field has been pretty dead for most of that time. I thought it showed a lot of promise, so I'm pretty disappointed.

[chutsu]

The field has not really been publicized that much, but it is by no means dead. Take the research done at Cornell for example, they are doing some really interesting work with Evolutionary Algorithms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMkHYE9-R0A), of which one PhD graduate (Michael Schmidt) has even started his own startup called Nutonian (http://www.nutonian.com) where they have a large list of customers (check it out).

Part time scientists is a Lunar X Prize team, the software lead of that group has used Cartesian Genetic Programming to evolve programs to filter images. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQDazGrKsuM) and network protocols (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoOOpiMJQ8s).

Agreed that Evolutionary Algorithms are taking a backseat at the moment, but you can argue that Neural Networks also was very dormant until some thing like Deep Neural Networks came out, which is essentially the same idea but with a new learning method (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-deep-learning-a-r...). I believe there will be a break through at some point, just don't think it is dead yet ;)

[mcphage]

Awesome, thanks :-) It was a field that I really liked, and had I continued in CS I would have definitely focused on it. But didn't really see much happening when I'd look into it periodically. I'm glad that it's continuing :-)