Evolution strategies work closely to the process you described.
For very small neural networks, it works very well especially in environment with sparse or quazi-sparse rewards. But, as soon as you try larger neural net (CNN + MLP, or Transformer-like arch) the process becomes super noisy and you either need to produce a tons of offsprings for the population or use gradient based techniques.
ingambe t1_ivaj6e5 wrote
Reply to comment by TiredOldCrow in [R] Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning (NeurIPS 2022) - Google Brain by smallest_meta_review
Evolution strategies work closely to the process you described. For very small neural networks, it works very well especially in environment with sparse or quazi-sparse rewards. But, as soon as you try larger neural net (CNN + MLP, or Transformer-like arch) the process becomes super noisy and you either need to produce a tons of offsprings for the population or use gradient based techniques.