I'm practicing writing some example GA's from books etc. but all of the sample programs are things like the TSP and some more graphical problems. It's defeating the purpose that 60-80 % of the problems are coding UI etc. Does anyone know of good resources or practice problems that don't involve much UI (and have answers that I can refer to in order to check to see if the GA is converging on the right points).

Logical expresions.

Simple games like tic tac toe.

XOR is a standard, simple test for learning algorithms.

Also look into pole balancing which many have used for benchmarking.

Also, why is TSP about UI? Generate a couple of points to represent cities, calculate using your algorithm, print out your result to a file, load in $FAVORITE_MATH_PACKAGE (try R if you need a free one), draw there.

How about searching for specific character strings/patterns, like if it was a genome? That can be done from the console...

Depending on what you're evolving, you could also evolve logic for a MUD.