Roger Alsing is a .NET developer who writes about genetic programming, including his Mona Lisa polygon experiment, and fast .NET serializers.
HN links it as the origin of the Mona Lisa evolution experiment. Commenters point to its FAQ on whether it counts as genetic programming, and its gallery.
It looks like it no longer does much progresses after some time. Many years ago I wrote one of those stuff, just a few days after the famous 2008 blog post doing the same (http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/). However after some time I switched the code to use simulated annealing, and it performed better. I'm running it for a few minutes against the Monalisa image to see what happens. Btw I had a plan to release the code after some cleanup, maybe tonight is the right moment after 6 years of this code hanging on my HD.
EDIT: after 6 minutes (64 shapes) -> http://imgur.com/gyZCjBD
EDIT2: after ~15 minutes -> http://imgur.com/5XMU8vH
Now trying using just triangles, again with 64 shapes, I remember it was much better than when using circles for most images.
EDIT3: Oh, much better now, after 6 minutes (64 triangles) -> http://imgur.com/x9E9TmK
EDIT4: 10 minutes more and she got a nose: http://imgur.com/bX8UTIQ
EDIT5: Code released! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8710418
He answers this in his faq (http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/09/genetic-programming-mona-lisa-faq/):
Q) Is this Genetic Programming?, I think it is a GA or even a hill climbing algorithm.
A) I will claim that this is a GP due to the fact that the application clones and mutates an executable Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).
Even if the population is small, there is still competition between the parent and the child, the best fit of the two will survive.
I studied these issues a lot (copyright, right of publicity, etc), and I think this particular use is fine. You are right that sometimes it is easy to figure out the text from the cloud, just like you can make out a famous photo from a very small 10x10 thumbnail, or draw Mona Lisa in 50 polygons http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/ or as a single tweet http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/3518306770/
It's actually not so bad. It's just JavaScript and maybe my code (I wrote JS version).
Roger Alsing (who was the original author and inspiration) did later an optimized compiled parallel version that was able to get Mona Lisa in 1 minute 34 seconds (on a 64 bit 4 core machine).
http://rogeralsing.com/2009/01/04/scaling-clustere-evolution-1-1-4/
Also there are supposed to be some efforts to run it on GPU, which should be even faster.
Summary: Video Codec based on vectorization of images rather than pixel encoding. Slow, but highly parallel. Not much info. Developers hope to have a codec for commercial use in some number of years.
PDF of authors' previous work on still images: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/47879/1/ID47879.pdf
Still too long?: "Mona Lisa in 50 Polygons[1]" Grows Up.
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[1] http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/
Looks like an implementation of http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/evolve/ - one of my favorite web-things ever made.
Edit: the "inspiration" for this is the same thing as Altered Qualia, Roger Johansson's post about genetic image evolution https://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/