Many, many adaptations I've seen happen in less than 100 000 cycles. These adaptations seem to be of the "changing when I do X" variety.
For instance, bots always shooting. Reproducing more often.
Bots learning to do new things, using -6 shots for feeding when they used -1 shots before, learning to tie feed when they never did before, is what takes much more time to develop.
I agree completly. B) Although there is probably an unconsidered(by us) safety factor to some of these "beneficial" mutations. Tiefeeding is probably dangerous from a bot's perspective since offspring are less likely to escape being fed from.
I personally think their evolution is a combination of random mutations, a bot's internal dna, external enviroment, and bot-bot interactions. I've been trying to analyze these factors more in depth, in hopes of being able to predict ahead of time what could happen in any given scenario.
One thing in my opinion, we need to work towards is making new behaviors easier to develop for the bots. For example, I've seen the bots doing fairly interesting things with the new tieports, so think further progress would definitly help. We may not be able to say exactly how the bots will use these commands, but we can make them easier to be used. :)