My at least sideways attempts have been to try and make it so that the conditions require a more advanced system each time I progress it. I think all I have been accomplishing is making them more efficient. I think it would help if my computer was a bit better. I might just be impatient though, I like it when things can run 100 cycles a second or more, so the population size I try to keep down. I guess this isn't so much advancement through diversity as it is trying to make it so a single really beneficial trait becomes of immediate benefit.
To that extent things have worked well. The bots adapted to all the pressures I have put them through but there are some limitations. I think the bots themselves are very well done, they can do a large number of amazing things when programmed, I'd love to see what can happen when it's by chance.
One of the bots I saw was the Ant one, that is really awesome and shows just what a designer can do, and I know that in time evolution could potentially create the same thing, but what it comes down to is what kind of pressures would be needed to create that?
I don't know, and naturally I surmise that no one really has a good answer, but maybe that's something I need to figure out, is what types of pressure encourage wild deviations, while what pressures force the bot down to it's most effective, yet most base systems.
I'm sure there's a thread better suited for such ideas, but like a real ecology, maybe the food system should be revamped in some ways? At the moment a bot seems to be able to eat anything it feels like all it needs is the impetus to do so. What if it needed more, the right genes to digest, not the right genes to simple attack? Least then you'd get bots that have mutated to where they are ineffective in one setting yet widly successful in another.
At least in my sim which has run 28,000,000 cycles, I know I have lost many new things just because Being strange is almost ALWAYS deadly, and there's little in the way of benign mutations.