The (Artificial) Intelligence to Adjust

Check out this article in Business Week. The idea is cool - teach a computer how to read stock market conditions and adjust on the fly to produce steady returns. And the founder is pretty buff.

I've always wondered if this can be done for advertising media buying. Put in a bunch of channels (print publications, online and mobile sites and ad networks, radio stations, outdoor, etc.), enter some objectives to achieve, and let the computer optimize away. Do you know of anyone working on this? I'd imagine Horizon Media and those big media buying agencies have something like this.

The idea itself is pretty fundamental, whether or not a computer with artificial intelligence is involved - execute an initiative or project, see if it meets the objectives you've set, adjust accordingly and continually improve. But can it be done in real time? And how do you know it's actually optimized?