@Brad, learning ai?

I came across an article http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/01/mario-teaches-feelings-how-an-ai-team-added-emotion-to-old-school-games/ about a group of reaearcherswho made a custom Mario game  here Mario learns to improve his skills based on trial & error over time top simply how the game world works .the article made me wonder if a certain level of this could be applied to gakcivIII,  oldibg @home type app to crunch numbers based on shared savegames that returns results to the mother ship for occasional Ai algorithm updates even if heavy duty number crunching is needed.