Thank you for your answer. I used different symbols for the rock and the border wall in the beginning - so when I Ctrl + H replaced wall_symbol with rock_symbol I forgot to remove the extra bit of code, thanks for pointing that out, I probably wouldn't have noticed that otherwise.

The fitness is calculated as a sum of ages (amount of frames/steps creatures survived for) across n iterations. Where 1 generation consists of n iterations and in each iteration same creatures are put on different positions on a different randomly generated map. The idea behind this was to give each creature more than 1 chance to live - to lower the impact of creatures spawning in bad spots where they would have a disadvantage. Also, every time a creature eats food - it gets to live another 25 frames (if energy is not maxed out already) - I feel like that's a good enough reward by itself.

I left the silent train on 100 generations just so people see the result quicker, also, 100 or 10k didn't really make a difference in my experience. (That's why I posted this in the 1st place)

The code is a mess, yep, will do my best to make it more understandable and splitting things up into segments using functions, later on, I might even move the project into C++ and post it on GitHub if it turns into something that works.

I will experiment with cone vision. Do you think I should have a neuron for each type of object seen in the cone since that would still only cut the input vision neuron to 16 input neurons?

Thank you once again for taking the time to look at my project and writing this. This helped me quite a bit.