This is similar to how I evolved the AI for my game Hexborne (Think X-Com meets Magic: The Gathering). I had agents designing sets of behavioral heuristics for bots (as "genes"), then enter them into 10k+ match tournaments in an iterative process. After each tournament agents could inspect all the heuristics and try to craft updated heuristics to improve their performance. Winning heuristics got a full statistical validation before being rolled into the baseline set that all agents build on top of.

To multitask I did all this over a multiplayer game server to harden the netcode and ferret out softlocks.