If anyone's interested in genetic programming:
A couple of friends and I have set up a good project for messing around with the idea of getting a ragdoll to walk using GP.
http://code.google.com/p/gp-movement-engine/
We've only just started. We're planning to do it using flash with box2d.
I've started a prototype in javascript just to get an idea of what works well and what doesn't. Feel free to mess around with the source in the svn. If anyone's quite interested in helping us out with the project then please feel free to help out and i can add you to the dev list :)
Anyway, here's my little prototype experiment so far:
http://beta.mylotro.eu/images/gp.html (best viewed in chrome!!!)
The idea is that it takes the 3 expressions in the boxes at the top, and mutates them until it finds an expression that equals 10000 (or close to).
Currently the population pool is massive. It starts at 90 but becomes 900 by the 2nd generation and stays at 900. I'll eventually try to reduce it once I've worked out exactly what works best with the mutation and crossover.
Also currently nodes are only doing self-crossover. I'd like to it eventually cross over in pairs.
But yeah. It finds 10,000 in ~7 generations at the moment.