The only thing that really matters is that the physics are kept consistent over the course of the 10 million or so runs for each scenario. Even if the rules are non-physical with regard to our niche little human environment, the evolution of the agents' tactics can be studied just as effectively.

It's tough to summarize the evolution leading up to us humans, but we probably had on the order of 1 billion "generations".

If I haven't recommended Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire I've been remiss; he starts out by pointing out that evolution has had a puny effect on humans as we know them because if you go to Mile High Stadium, with your mother to the right of you and every subsequent row a generation further advanced, and you all stand up and do The Wave, by the time that "wave" gets back to you it will have blown clear through Australopithecus and the person to your left will have lived their life in a tree.

If humans were fruit flies our entire evolutionary history would play out in like eight weeks.

So I think that each generational leap in learning/adapting for the virtual hiders and seekers is very inefficient for the experiments that they're running compared to us animals driven to do pretty much whatever it takes to survive.

blackbootz suggested Joseph Heinrick's the Secret of our Success and he was spot on. There's a formidable advantage in culture whereby if you can learn something from yourself, your children will adapt it and by a hundred generations away, your species will do it. But if you can learn something from someone else, everyone's children will adapt it and by three generations away, your species will do it.

"Eye" and "intelligence" are both on a spectrum. Is the light-sensing organ on top of reptilian heads an "eye"? it's all a lot of critters have but it's also a lot less than the reptiles themselves have. How about a compound eye compared to the eye of an owl? "true" artificial intelligence in the eyes of everyone isn't a computer that answers questions, it's a golem.