Evolving soccerbots
NOTE: The good stuff (pictures and captions) is near the bottom of the page.
The evolved soccerbot problem is an order of magnitude more interesting than something like evolving CoreWars bots, because the individual bots that make up a successful robotic soccer team have to cooperate without any direct communication (that would be mind-reading).

A brief overview of the role of military funding in artificial intelligence research.
And here is another look

An interview with John Koza, inventor of genetic programming
'There was incredible hostility to genetic programming,' Koza remembers. 'And most of it was centred in the genetic algorithm community - which is curious because the GA community on the whole has been excluded from the mainstream AI and machine learning community'