Your comment made me think of neural nets. My knowledge is admittedly quite surface level but there seems to be an analogy to the emergent behavior of trained n

Your comment made me think of neural nets. My knowledge is admittedly quite surface level but there seems to be an analogy to the emergent behavior of trained network. Also, I'm thinking about the recent (latest?) SimCity with it's much discussed ability to track each individual actor, which apparently became a computational crutch that limited the size of the cities you could build. It seems like there are some interesting game mechanics possible (as you suggest) that could also benefit from the recent GPU enhancements for neural nets.