The bots in my sim are now at regular F1 costs, but currently with 80 alge in the sim. (Going to cut down slowly to end up like regular F1 settings)
Hadn't even noticed there was a checkbox for disabling viruses in a bot species, but the waste managing part helped keep big berthas to a manageable amount and allowed the bots to evolve to a larger size.
I only run the sim in the evening when I'm home, so it'll probably be a while yet before I start working on getting it to actualy beat F1 bots
The bots mostly move in the same direction since this reduces the amount of conflicts, and makes big berthas less likely to kill off it's own kind.
At a certain point in their life they start locking themselves in place and sometimes tie to the alge. This helps keep the alge in place for everyone to feed on them, and the behavior has been around since the earliest stages of the sim. Whenever the population dropped too far leaving few older bots to hold the alge in place, the younger bots would start to die out, so it seems like the bots aren't able to track the alge properly and depend on the older bots for feeding.
The older bots don't seem to gain much from being locked since they're facing the wrong way their shots don't hit the alge they're blocking unless they tie to an alge and draw it in, but this seems to be random they're just as likely to push it away.
There was a subspecies wich lasted for about 400K cycles, wich would lock itself very early and spind and shoot, this way by grouping together they could herd the alge as the other species moved them into the locked clusters of bots. This seemed to work well enough for both species, but only for a while, the clusters moved around slowly over generations and had problems when hitting the corners of the toroidial map.
But they did coexist for a long time, saved the sim, fogured maybe I could tweek it and increase sim size and stuff like that to make them brach out even more.
And concerning the more recent topic, I think the current "evolution" of humans points towards groups that are more likely to become sperm donors and groups that have a lot of children for religious, cultural or biological reasons, but probably mostly the 2 first mentioned. So my guess would be that our "sim" has reached a point where almost anything will survive and the biodiversity within our specie is increasing dramaticaly. And I don't think a higher intelect would be the mutation to trigger the next evolutional step, and the "correct" mutation would also depend on the part of the world you're in.
And even if people could pick the traits of their children I'm not sure intelect would be the most prominent direction, intelectuals tend to have fewer children. I'm sure they'd make some realy smart people if they can, and even if they don't have children their knowledge will help create even smarter shildren, leaving a different kind of heritage in the genome. But I'm not sure this would become the "comon" genome, I think the majority may prefer to stay as they are, knowledge does not equal happyness or a large amount of decendants, so not everyone will persue it and those who do are no more likely to become the majority over generations.
I think it's hard to say where we go from here evolutionwise... medical science is only just starting to get serious so I'm not sure the imune system will play a huge role for much longer, not sure intelect is a driving factor and it's not entirely bound one genome, a large part comes from your culture and parents. Faster reproduction in some way could mean a lot in western countries... maybe... but in an overpopulated place someone why requires less food may be more liekly to get by. I think in the end the one who adapts the fastest would be the safest bet, our world changes faster than ever before and whoever gets with the program the fastest gets by. So more powerfull epigenetic memmory... that would be my guess.