You know I've been thinking about this idea not too long ago where you would mix new Neural Net techniques together with the recent Distributed Computing projects of the past few years.

If you don't know what Distributed Computing is check out this article on Wikipedia.
A great example of a distributed computing project done right is SETI@Home!

I mean, if serious computer professionals will run a program in the background to search for alien signals on the slim chance they'll find something among all that noise, then why on Earth wouldn't gamers run run a small app in the same way to train for competative enemy bots and opponents?

It seems like such a great fit. Take, for an example, a first person shooter like Quake or Unreal. And lets assume that this game engine uses trained NNs to 'run' the enemy bots. Well it's going to take ages to make more and more challenging bots s you will have to consistantly train them in several scenarios over and over and over again...

Ever play a game where you play it enough and the enemy becomes so pretictable in it's behaviour that you don't want to play it anymore, just based on that? But you love the game's genre so you look for other games like that one, but same thing... preticable after a point. What if there was some system or mechanism that kept the enemy learning and adapting to scenarios.

You can even apply this last idea to bots that are on your own 'team'. This can act as an exciting benefit where some bots may have more experience in some trainned areas than others and sometime even you, if the game engine tracks such stats about your own player.

Now some of these ideas can be incorporated using non-Distributed Computing systyems, but imagine the increased variety of using all that extra processing time to mix things up a bit. Variety is a game developers and game player's mutual best friend because for the player, this adds more user experiences, and more user experiences means more replay value. This is a great aspect of this concept as it pumps more value into your game design.