Jok: these gigantic posts could all be avoided if you read what NEAT is.
It's not a simple feed forward perceptron neural net like what you are thinking; its a system for growing neural nets from individual parts called "genes" and evolving them to be better over time. It's a LOT more advanced than what you are talking about, and its being used to solve much harder problems than what I'm suggesting.
It should be obvious to you why the argument "I tried to do x in toribash and i gave up because it was too hard, therefore x is impossible in toribash" is silly.
Imagine you are building a bridge across a stream, and the builder you are asking for help tells you "Don't waste your time, I tried to build a bridge and it was a lot of work and I never got anywhere, so no one ever will".
Addressing your other points:
1. Training neural nets is fun. I won't deny that. However, you again underestimate the strength of modern neuroevolution methods. Toribash right now has no single player a.i., so every game will strictly be against yourself. If you don't think people would love the chance to fight a challenging opponent in single player mode you are not being honest with yourself.
2. There ARE ways of getting around the frame/tic limiter or any other locks Toribash has in place to control the speed of execution. Like I've explained before, its possible to write a "wrapper" that fools toribash into thinking its drawing, but all the opengl calls don't do anything or waste any computational power. There are probably easier ways than this as well; in other words this is not an unsolvable problem, or even a very hard one. I do NOT want to go to all the effort of writing my own openGL wrapper until I hear back from Hampa on if there is a simpler way.
3. Your understanding of how good neural nets are is based on your experience with fixed topology networks, which is an entirely different approach than what I'm talking about. With NEAT, the network changes dynamically to become better, so control systems and the like evolve without any special effort on the programmers part.
If you wanted to evolve a Toribash AI that could both block, and jump, and dodge, there is no better way to do this than with NEAT; if you don't believe me, ACTUALLY READ WHAT IT IS and check out some of the experiments performed with it. Control systems emerge automatically if you set up the fitness criteria cleverly. For an example of this, check NERO at nerogame.com which actually uses a realtime implementation of NEAT to control little soldiers in an RTS kind of environment. It's quite easy to evolve soldiers that can choose between complex behaviors like fleeing or attacking on the fly based on their environment.
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Thank you for the support skillz.
If you are interested, the part I'm stuck on now is trying to reduce I/O use in the communication between Toribash and the other program. Right now, everytime toribash wants to talk to the other program, it has to save a file, and vice versa. I have a feeling its probably good to avoid writing to the hard drive about 10000 times a second for weeks on end, but I can't figure out how to save files outside of /data/scripts.