A different Game of Life
Rock Bottom!
A game where artificial creatures with artificial genomes and artificial brains are trained to solve increasingly complex puzzles. The interesting part is that they acquire the necessary behavioral capabilities by actual evolution (mutation and survival of the fittest). We want to answer the question whether it is possible to write a program that can learn to succeed in a hostile environment by applying sufficiently abstract behavioral patterns. For example, we train a population to flip a switch in room A to obtain something, then take an individual from that population and have it attempt the same process but in an environment where the room geometry is entirely different.
Some of this has been done in boring academic settings with no (or almost no) user interface. We make this a playable game, which should be fun to play in a way DMA Design's Lemmings is.