or a pokemon that you actually "train" like you would a real animal, following all the principles of animal reinforcement (which you sort of get for free with neural nets)
The Creatures trilogy also had some pretty advanced AI, based on neural nets. They're pretty small by today's standards, but the paper below does a fantastic job of explaining how they are trained while minimizing the computational time.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.18...
- You were supposed to pet a creature if he did something correctly. Unfortunately, that same behavior also encouraged him to eat whatever he was holding. So I pet him after he caught a boulder, which then made him eat the boulder.
Gameplay focuses on raising alien creatures known as Norns, teaching them to survive, helping them explore their world, defending them against other species, and breeding them. Words can be taught to creatures by a learning computer (for verbs) or by repeating the name of the object while the creature is looking at it. After a creature understands language, the player can instruct their creature by typing in instructions, which the creature may choose to obey.
A complete life cycle is modelled for the creatures – childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, each with their own particular needs. The gameplay is designed to foster an emotional bond between the player and their creatures. Rather than taking a scripted approach, Creatures series games were driven by detailed biological and neurological simulation and their unexpected results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(video_game_series)
I bought it on [well-known website that sells old, DRM-free games) but it was a bit... too old? So I never quite played it. So I have no clue how well the whole idea worked out.