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?
it is of course entirely possible we are on the flip side and too low-level - this is something we're trying to find out.
Maybe there is the possibility of some kind of stack? Something that starts low level and somehow can be composed or integrated into higher levels of abstraction?
I once had an idea for a system that basically took in multiple video inputs and produced video output. Individuals would then run instances (that they could tweak) that were connected to a larger network. Somewhere between an MMO and Folding@home. Not only would it distribute the compute load but it would simulate the chaos of large numbers of individuals trying out different things.
Again I think it comes back to the fitness function and how things get nudged "upward." In any case it seems all you need to do is get fitness right and then let it rip...
Have you explored any distributed concepts like that?
I agree, for the same reasons you mentioned, resource constraints will need to be baked in (they are already, to some extent, if you consider the constrained resource to be z80-CPU-seconds the program has access to). something more akin to energy in our real world, which can be manipulated, aggregated, shared, pooled, stolen, etc feels more natural, however.
imo meaningful intelligence could conceivably developed in a soup (even in-silico), unclear on what timeline, but grounding it with human and/or real-world data is necessary to make it useful to us (bio-compatible, if you will?)