Very cool ideas, Jonathan. Like Amazon's "Alexa", it would be nice if we could say "hey 'Wolf', show me what i would look like if i were a horse." And it would take your photos and DNA data, a horse's DNA data, and automatically interpolate between them in an efficient and meaningful way, yielding a 3D image.

Auto-parallelization would be wonderful too, if Mathematica somehow knew when to compute in serial, and when to compute in parallel.

In regards to a "Wolfram One-Liner generator"-- That's a great idea, not just for the competition, but for discovery in general. And not just for one line. I think the best way to do that would be to train neural nets on existing code, like you said, rather than exhaustively trying all permutations of functions. One could imagine a mining program, which runs nonstop, looking for novel relationships and correlations between shapes, rule-types, dimensions, etc. A "wisdom miner," if you will.

One tool which might come in handy is the "fundamental structure of relationship", which i define in this post, since a meta-programming virtual assistant would need to be able to reason, at least somewhat. I'm not sure if a 'virtual assistant' is what you meant, but that's the direction I would take it.

I would love to try to build one, but sadly it is outside my skill-set, and it would be an all-consuming project. But I think you're correct that high-level meta-algorithms will be responsible for the most interesting results in the next few years.