OK, so I got tired from all the whining about how "evolution does not work in DBs" and decided to show off my skillz!
People have been complaining that bots don't evolve and eventually just die off completely. So I took PY's Simplebot and his Rabbit bot as food and started running some simulations. First, I was getting the same result as he (and some others) did - make mutation rate very small an bots don't evolve anywhere, make it larger - they die off. Also, I could not strike a good balance to make "predator/prey" cycles.
But after several (really, not that many - between 5 and 10) tries I finally tuned the conditions and the mutation rate.
And here we go! Simplebot population survived for at least 1 million cycles (when I stopped the sim) and they were evolving too! Overall evolution resulted in 10 changes in the DNA. Just like me and PY were predicting, bots lost any limitation on top speed, and they also acquired some more stuff. I suck at bot programming, so I'll let you figure the changes out. One thing I noticed was that they had some weird gene structure, two conditions in a row.
When put in competition with the original Simplebot, the mutant does very well. It lags behind in the beginning, but eventually catches up and wins.
So, there - I don't want to hear any more "bots just die" or "nothing good evolves" or anything along those lines!
Attached is an excel file with DNA comparison of original Simplebot and three mutants and also my settings file. Enjoy!