Actually I think what happened was that robots in only one of the colonies learned the lying behavior, which really highlights the random aspect of the "evolution" going on. Members of only one out of 4 groups of robots happened to start lying even though (presumably) all of the colonies started out with the same basic set. Since the original instructions were "randomly move around and randomly react to light signals," some difference between the random sequence of events in one colony and the sequence of events in the others caused one colony to start behaving differently.
In other words, the organizational principles that the robots develop for optimizing their behavior are to some extent (but not entirely) dictated by random events. No design was in place for the 50th-generation robot behaviors, but more than one organized system emerged through random chance.
This sounds sorta obvious at first but think about it. This is a really direct example of organization emerging *completely unbidden* from chaos. It goes against most people's ideas of "random chance" and the nature of "chaotic" situations.
I don't know, I think this is really really cool.
