I did my high school senior project on NEAT! It was a c++ project set up as an "ants eating food" expermient where their miniscule brains learned over several i

I did my high school senior project on NEAT! It was a c++ project set up as an "ants eating food" expermient where their miniscule brains learned over several iterations to go to the closest food and eat it. I later did a version (in common lisp) where instead of an ant knowing where the nearest food was, it had a visual field extending forward that would feed as inputs to the NN. Then added predators, poisonous food items, etc etc. It was fascinating seeing it all unfold. Genetic algorithms seem like a somewhat forgotten but very handy tool for ML. I've always wondered what the cost of running experiments on species/populations over and over for however many hundreds of iterations is compared to something like back propagation on a large network.