Yes, that's the other thing -- starting from a soup, it takes a very long time to know if the parameters that have been chosen are conducive to evolving something we would consider intelligent. The gif in vicgalle's github is largely inscrutable (even if you understand what it represents in aggregate), and I imagine one would be staring at something like that for quite some time.

Obviously, you have to "cheat" biology somewhere, we don't have hundreds of millions of years. Neural networks cheat by essentially throwing out the whole evolutionary process and environment that led to the brain, attempting to make a model that works like the brain. IMO that is too much cheating.

Starting with a substrate of random bits of assembly code strikes me as a little too low-level (which is not to dismiss this research at all, I think it's valuable, I'm just spitballing big-picture ideas). Have you considered starting with something like the Unreal or Unity engine, or even Minecraft?

You would lose the elegant and unopinionated search space of all programs, and you would have to engineer a more structured system (kind of like Spore but more simulation than game), but I feel like you might be able to get some more readily relatable behaviors sooner?