I did a lot of work on evolutionary computation a while back. Now there's something that can soak up some cycles. It's also embarrassingly parallel. (For those

I did a lot of work on evolutionary computation a while back. Now there's something that can soak up some cycles. It's also embarrassingly parallel. (For those who want to trot out the "GAs don't work well," "evolution is slow," etc. mantras, please delve into the literature first. EC has some interesting and unique results, the most important of which is that it's the only "AI" technique I'm aware of that can demonstrate true creativity. EC can invent novel structures ex-nihilo. Everything else can just optimize, find maxima, etc. Another way of saying it is that EC can find maxima involving unknown, novel parameters that it invents along the way, while everything else requires that you know all the parameters to be optimized ahead of time. So EC can work with unknown unknowns, not just unknown values of knowns.)