And at ~500 generations the champions are still the same 3. I have fiddled with the parameters several times to no avail. I've tried very little mutation probability (1-5%) with low mutation amount (1-10%) but also 75-100 mut. prob with 1-5% mutation amount and any figures in between and nothing seems to make it go out of the local minima.
Is there any way to get out of this? or when this happens in nature the species simply goes extinct or gets eaten by everyone else?
It's quite hard to get any better than 10 or so steps, luck starts playing a major role after a while.
Some gait branches seem to reach a dead-end where any improvement would need to come from a major overhaul of the gene combination instead of small mutations.
The terrain starts to get more variation as the distance increases, so that's another piece of evil against the walkers. :D Maybe I should turn that off.
I've let it run for a couple of days. I don't think I got past 12 steps, but it looked pretty regular walking for a while. :)
Currently at generation 120 with 7 steps, looks like it is "evolving" in bursts, with long periods of nothing.
Well it is stuck at 9 steps at gen 400+.
I wonder if the author got any further. I would say this is close to the limit.