Pardon me if I'm really ignorant of the AI field here, but doesn't this look like the beginning of more general artificial intelligence? The organic feel of some of these moves is almost scary to me.
Is the baseball player's anticipation of the future really all that different from what this program is doing?
Is a decade or two of baseball practice really all that different from a computer playing and re-playing the game over and over looking for optimal strategy?
I don't really see how it's time travel but that's what he called it.
Genetic algorithms (and variants) can pick up some very interesting patterns for achieving the target fitness. I don't think this is necessarily anything new, and GAs have their limitations, but applying them to multiple NES games is impressive. I'm convinced that GAs will be an important part of future computing.