After my sabbatical ended I didn’t have as much time to work with this as I had wanted. But I’ve been noodling around more recently, trying to get a better sense of how it behaves and what it might or might not be useful for.
It is possible to set up challenges which are very difficult/practically impossible to solve because there is no adaptive pathway. So in addition to illustrating constructive neutral evolution, it can also illustrate some of the limitations of RM + NS (or really just RM). Obviously there are other options in that regard (such as the problems discussed in Watson’s Compositional Evolution. But I like that this has a concrete and visually dynamic phenotype.
Happy to discuss possible applications & modifications if anyone thinks they might have a need.