I love watching these. It really brings ideas about evolution to light, especially that the design that takes over is not necessarily the optimal design, but it was "locally optimal" in that it is better than all the designs that are small variations of it.

It's interesting to let the designs evolve for 10 or 15 generations then crank up the mutation percentage to 50% or so for a couple of generations, then tune it back down to 5%. This shakes up the environment and can possibly stimulate better designs that never got a chance to evolve.

It shows how important major environmental shifts are for the long-term health of a species (maybe!) When I used to teach university courses, my students would sit in groups, get comfortable, and then half-way though the term I'd use a simple algorithm to switch people around to new groups with no common factors. There would lots of complaining but people would settle in. After a few weeks, I'd let them sit wherever so they could reunite with friends if they like. I thought of it as creating a stable environment, letting it grow, then dropping an asteroid on the planet and letting it restabilize -- a mini "ideal evolution environment" if you will.

It's cool to see vestiges of structures that were useful at one point and are no longer useful. I don't really see them in this simulation but there's probably examples to be found.