The only possible issue is while this increases potential complexity (which is good) it decreases reaction time that bots have. Already bots can accomplish alot in a single cycle. The few cycles it takes to turn and "lock" onto an opponent are very important to the fitness landscape, and we should be careful before we change it.
I think any changes to eyes would have a dramatic affect on the survivability of the bots, eyes are very important in the scheme of evolution.
I was thinking about the picture here
Eye placement and eyesight Where the eye's overlap the animal has depth perception, where they can see with only one eye they have no depth perception but can ID objects.
There's a simple idea for you to program!
That's what the bots are doing wrong isn't it! They have depth perception through the side eyes but can't ID. I think, (as a simpler change than above!) Bots should lose their ability to see distance, speed, maybe Ypos Xpos with their side eyes but gain the ability to ID objects with these eyes.
Serial numbers would come in useful then, quickly allowing you to see if eyes 1,2,3,4 are seeing the same bot, but that would give them a form of depth perception, after all any bot that fills all those eyes is probably not a million miles away!
Serial numbers also run into a problem if you think about how you are going to use them, you'd have to store information about the bot with each serial number in a memory location to access it later. That could quickly lead to a form of information overload and would probably be quite difficult to use well.
Hmm, OK, how about eye1,2,3,4 being seen as a single unit, the program works out the closest object being seen through those eyes and that is the only object you are allowed to ID? Maybe not.., the problem (for me) is how to replicate what the two eye's of mammals do using the 9 eyes of the bots.
I do so like the idea of changing eyes though!
PS, just to keep up appearances of keeping to the topic...
Bitozoa