"It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd like is a game that allowed you

"It seems like many hacker news readers would enjoy a game in which you assemble an AI in competition with other AIs -- what I'd like is a game that allowed you to do that with varying levels of abstraction." A research project in neural networks for games called NERO at the University of Texas is along the lines of what you are talking about: http://www.nerogame.org/ http://www.nerogame.org/