June 28th, 2024

Computational Life: How Well-Formed, Self-Replicating Programs Emerge

The study explores self-replicating programs on computational substrates, emphasizing emergence from random interactions and self-modification. It investigates programming languages, machine instruction sets, and theoretical possibilities, contributing to Origin of Life and Artificial Life fields.

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Computational Life: How Well-Formed, Self-Replicating Programs Emerge

The paper titled "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction" explores the emergence of self-replicating programs on computational substrates. It delves into the dynamics and conditions necessary for self-replicators to arise, especially in environments involving logical, mathematical, or programming rules. The study demonstrates that self-replicators tend to emerge from random interactions and self-modification in the absence of an explicit fitness landscape. The research investigates various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets to understand the process better. It highlights the evolution of increasingly complex dynamics following the appearance of self-replicators. Additionally, the paper presents a minimalistic programming language where self-replicators are theoretically possible but have not been observed yet. The work contributes to the fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life by shedding light on the computational principles underlying the emergence of self-replicating programs.

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Link Icon 5 comments
By @jekude - 4 months
Combinatory Chemistry [0] is a great paper that is referenced. Using Combinatory Logic feels a lot cleaner than brainfuck IMO.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07916

By @29athrowaway - 4 months
Brainfuck is a useful language for evolutionary programming because it is Turing complete, it has few instructions, the interpreter is easy to implement, and a mutation operator is also easy to implement.

There are different ways to deal with bounds checking when moving the tape: saturation, wrapping and invalidation. I often chose to invalidate a program that crosses bounds, as it usually generates a cleaner program that is more compatible with other interpreters as well.

In the paper the part that's interesting is that there was no explicit fitness functions. The higher fitness emerges in the form of the replicator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOHGBuZCswA

By @JyrkiAlakuijala - 4 months
Zilog Z80: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. I'm actually creating life nowadays.
By @p1esk - 4 months
They use Brainfuck language for the experiments. Seriously.