This was one of the areas I wrote about wanting to do research in in my college application essay, but never did. I'll keep my eyes open for an opportunity to apply genetic algorithms; it should be fun.

I'd like to hear if anyone's evolved significantly improved neural networks (instead of designing them). I don't know enough to say whether neural networks are good targets for genetic-algorithmic evolution, but it would be pretty fantastic to be able to easily evolve networks that are good at a simple specified objective (e.g. classification).