This bottom up approach was investigated in the late 90's after researchers became skeptical that the symbolic AI approaches in vogue then would achieve genera

This bottom up approach was investigated in the late 90's after researchers became skeptical that the symbolic AI approaches in vogue then would achieve general AI. You can look for the topic of Artifical Life, Emergent Computation, Artifical Evolution. See the Santa Fe Institute conferences on ALife. There were some promising initial results but the field never managed to take off.