I'm thinking the most successful "automated exploration" so far has been Catagolue's method: simply generate a whole lot of random-soup initial configurations,

I'm thinking the most successful "automated exploration" so far has been Catagolue's method: simply generate a whole lot of random-soup initial configurations, run them until they settle, and then poke through the ashes looking for interesting stuff: https://catagolue.hatsya.com/census Seems like that gets the most emergent-behavior bang for your buck. All the other "automated search techniques" that I can think of are too specifically tailored to some particular problem.