LÖVE

Happy holidays to you too, my friend!
How does the "evolution" work btw?

Great little greetings! Love the "evolution"! I don't have any greetings card so, happy holidays!

Davidobot: It's a fairly standard genetic algorithm: a "population" of 25 random strings with the length of the message prepared in advance (well, for simplicity's sake only letters are randomized, the rest of the characters have been taken from the message). Then, it makes a copy of some of those strings, weighted so those that are closer to the message have a higher chance to get picked, randomly changes some of the characters in those copies, splices them together to get a new population of 25 random strings, and continue the process until you find the exact message used.

Reminds me of the climax to WarGames when David (The WOPR computer) is trying to find the missile launch codes by running through random characters to match them up against the real one.

You just need to have it playing a game of Tic Tac Toe against itself below to teach it that you can't always win and sometimes you just have to accept it.