I've only heard of the two topics seriously discussed together in the context of directed evolution. Instead of using radiation to increase the rate of mutation

I've only heard of the two topics seriously discussed together in the context of directed evolution. Instead of using radiation to increase the rate of mutation, use (semi) randomized snippets injected via CRISPR with a feedback loop that includes your optimization function (i.e. increasing temperature range for a protein). The conclusion was that the data would be far too sparse for the algorithm to really learn anything.