AI evolution sim idea

Create a program with a series of trivia question "gates". These gates may transmit and receive bits, as well as signals for ending a transmission. In addition to gates, there are virtual entities with a food counter, and an internal algorithm, written in a simple assembly-like language, including one of several actions:

• Poll a gate
  1. If the entity has not completed the previous gate a certain number of times, reduce the request to their max gate
  2. Send the entity a stream of bits
  3. Give the entity a certain timespan in which to start responding. If it fails, score 0 and return
  4. Once the above timespan has elapsed, entities may not stop sending bits for more than a certain amount of time, or they score 0
  5. If an entity exceeds the number of bits, they score 0
  6. A correct answer yields points based on the gate's difficulty, an incorrect answer gets 0
• Try to send an entity data
• Try to listen for signals being sent
• Transfer food to another entity
• Various boolean algebra
• Jump to another code location if the top stack element is negative
• Reproduce
• Read and write from their memory space (one space for both code and data)

Different actions cost differing amounts of food to execute - reproduction costs vary based on algorithm length. Visualizations can be done to show how the population is progressing as a whole on different scales (questions solved per organism, food per organism, average code length, average answer speed, amount of communications sent/received..)