Using evolution of neural nets to get artificial intelligence [video]

The book Blondie24 is an interesting popular science style account of this type of AI.

http://www.amazon.com/Blondie24-Playing-Kaufmann-Artificial-...

They partially trained their checkers algorithm by playing it online against humans. The funny part was that they couldn't get many opponents until they changed their handle to Blondie24, then game requests came flooding in...

Transcript available? No Flash here.

I suspect this is a resurgence of the decades-old idea of using evolutionary algorithms to find weights for neural network nodes.

I'm waiting for the next resurgence :)

Weights and connections between neurons and "sensory" inputs.

Google on Polyworlds and/or virgil griffith or go to virgil.gr for more info.

Very, very cool. I'd love to get into this field (I'm tryin!).