[buffalobuffalo]

I've used NEAT a few for a few different things. The main upside of it is that it requires a lot less hyper-parameter tuning than modern reinforcement learning options. But that's really the only advantage. It really only works on a subset of reinforcement learning tasks (online episodic). Also, it is a very inefficient search of the solution space as compared to modern options like PPO. It also only works on problems with fairly low dimensional inputs/outputs.

That being said, it's elegant and easy to reason about. And it's a nice intro into reinforcement learning. So definitely worth learning.