The AI Challenges were so cool and I had hoped there would be more of them.
A "humbling experience" is definitely the right choice of words.
I did some minor work on a PoC for the one after Ants. It was multi-player (or: multi-bot) Asteroids but things fizzled out as most of the people organizing moved on to other things.
It's an interesting showcase in how we (or at least I) assumed what the lifecycle of hyperlinks would be. (My assumption was they would perhaps 404 at some point, but not this.)
There's some minor issues with the blog post though that don't make it entirely correct Genetic Programming as written by Koza's. I'd have to dive into it again but I think it was either with the way mutations are done or how fitness is evaluated.
I would even go so far (as I recently said on Mastodon) that nowadays using Aurora over the Google Play Store is safer since it doesn't display ads for other apps just above the search results for the app one is looking for. If one isn't paying attention or running on autopilot (it happens) one might click on the ad and install some malware.
So annoying.