The zdnet article has this passage in it: "The PlanetWars contest received extra attention due to a post on reddit titled “The end is near! Self-improving AI based on Genetic Programming is beating 95% of hand-coded submissions in the Google AI Challenge”. The genetic algorithm coded by a team calling itself space.invaders did better than expected but ended up in 277th place."<p>That really is quite an interesting development, given that the people that compete in these contests typically are pretty good at what they do, I'm really surprised that a GA derived program would do that well. Is there something about this particular challenge that sets the stage for that to happen or is there more to it?<p><a href="http://ai-contest.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1136" rel="nofollow">http://ai-contest.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1136</a>
<i>"This competition can be viewed as an AI contest. But it can also be viewed as a programming contest. And it was a question of speed: how quick your development is; how much your tools drag you down. This is where I see that Lisp is just great. It allows me to iterate extremely quickly over ideas."</i>