I went fairly far with this, creating a simulation of creatures I called worms using an unholy marriage of neural networks, cellular automata, and classifier sy

I went fairly far with this, creating a simulation of creatures I called worms using an unholy marriage of neural networks, cellular automata, and classifier systems (a pattern matching approach based on genetic algorithms). I wanted to see whether a population of "worms" with neural network brains would outcompete a population with classifier system brains. Rust makes this both fun and a challenge - immutable variables and trait objects make simulation programming a bit trickier. In the end the project fell off a cliff when I got grumpy that I couldn't create a single templatized breeding function that could apply to both types of brains - because of those trait objects. It started to look like I'd have to unwind a lot of my design to rework it (a common experience in Rust!) and then I got a new job, and you know the story. In every other respect Rust made this project a real pleasure - the tooling is great, particularly the compiler. It's been a couple of years, perhaps I'll dust it off again!