Wow, so we've all heard about the Lord of the Rings moves. All those crazy battle scenes? Yeah, apparently each and every character in all the big battles is an individual artificially intelligent character. So they put together a few dozen fighting personalities, gave them different physical characteristics, and sent them to battle. The characters use their eyes and ears to make logical (or fuzzy-logical) decisions. They made the plot predicated side win by giving one side more/better fighters with attributes that would make them win. Pretty cool.

I guess they would set the battle up, let their renderer chug it out overnight, and look at it in the morning. In an earlier version, they put in a battle personality that wasn't as battle-ready as they thought. Apparently most of the copies of a particular personality would run away! I found the article at Popular Science magazine. Props to the NPR show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! for having a question about this topic.