Three weeks ago, I was at a science fair demonstrating a genetic algorithm that would create AIs for two-player boardgames, and included a test case with tic-tac-toe.
Guys from the IEEE talked to me at length, loved it, and gave me their grand prize. Two judges (both Lisp hackers (and both thrilled to see an 18-year old doing AI with CL)) also loved it...but the other judges did not understand it at all, so I didn't even place at the actual fair. Sigh.
The evolved warriors weren't all that impressive either.
Really required a large number of generations, which my poor turbo pascal skills or lack of hardware didn't really provide. I wonder if I can find that code on a floppy somewhere...
In recent years some evolved warriors were able to compete with human crafted warriors. Optimizing just parts of a warrior with GAs is also a popular method.
I lost. They had no idea what was talking about. Early lesson in the importants of communicating technical ideas.