Related papers: The computational inevitability of life: self-repl…

The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…

Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…

In this work, a neural network is trained to replicate the code that trains it using only its own output as input. A paradigm for evolutionary self-replication in neural programs is introduced, where program parameters are mutated, and the…

One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…

Natural selection explains how life has evolved over millions of years from more primitive forms. The speed at which this happens, however, has sometimes defied formal explanations when based on random (uniformly distributed) mutations.…

Artificial organisms are computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. How do these lifelike information-processing behaviours could arise in diverse far-from-equilibrium physical systems remains an open question. Here,…

Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…

Computation is commonly defined as the execution of abstract algorithms over symbolic representations, with physical systems treated as substrates that realise predefined operations. While effective for engineered machines, this separation…

The main deficiency of the algorithms running on digital computers nowadays is their inability to change themselves during the execution. In line with this, the paper introduces the so-called replicated algorithms, inspired by the concept…

While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…

We introduce and study a learning theory which is roughly automatic, that is, it does not require but a minimum of initial programming, and is based on the potential computational phenomenon of self-reference, (i.e. the potential ability of…

There is a cognitive limit in Human Mind. This cognitive limit has played a decisive role in almost all fields including computer sciences. The cognitive limit replicated in computer sciences is responsible for inherent Computational…

Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they…

Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…

Reversible computation requires that intermediate data be explicitly undone rather than discarded. In quantum programming, this principle appears as uncomputation, usually treated as a technical cleanup mechanism. We instead present…

Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…

Typical arguments for results like Kleene's Second Recursion Theorem and the existence of self-writing computer programs bear the fingerprints of equational reasoning and combinatory logic. In fact, the connection of combinatory logic and…

Recent breakthroughs in AI capability have been attributed to increasingly sophisticated architectures and alignment techniques, but a simpler principle may explain these advances: memory makes computation universal. Memory enables…

One of the main goals of Artificial Life is to research the conditions for the emergence of life, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be. Artificial Chemistries are one of the most important tools for this purpose because they provide…

The drive for reproducibility in the computational sciences has provoked discussion and effort across a broad range of perspectives: technological, legislative/policy, education, and publishing. Discussion on these topics is not new, but…