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"The human brain is an incredibly impressive information processor, even though it "works" quite a bit slower than an ordinary computer. Many researchers in artificial intelligence look to the organization of the brain as a model for building intelligent machines. Think of a sort of "analogy" between the complex webs of interconnected neurons in a brain and the densely interconnected units making up an artificial neural network (ANN), where each unit--just like a biological neuron--is capable of taking in a number of inputs and producing an output."

These examples of experimental evolution with robots verify the power of evolution by mutation, recombination, and natural selection. In all cases, robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behaviour because their genomes had random values. However, a few hundreds of generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons. PLoS Biology