Related papers: Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicat…
A self-replicator is usually understood to be an object of definite form that promotes the conversion of materials in its environment into a nearly identical copy of itself. The challenge of engineering novel, micro- or nano-scale…
Autocatalytic processes underlie diverse systems in which replication is triggered at interfaces, including heterogeneous catalysis on solid substrates, enzyme activity at membranes, viral infections, biofilm growth, and spatially…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
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…
Self-replicability is the unique attribute observed in all the living organisms and the question how the life was physically initiated could be equivalent to the question how self-replicating informative polymers were formed in the abiotic…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
In this work, we describe a self-replication-based mechanism for designing agents of increasing complexity. We demonstrate the validity of this approach by solving simple, standard evolutionary computation problems in simulation. In the…
How do complex adaptive systems, such as life, emerge from simple constituent parts? In the 1990s Walter Fontana and Leo Buss proposed a novel modeling approach to this question, based on a formal model of computation known as $\lambda$…
This work concerns a many-body deterministic model that displays life-like properties as emergence, complexity, self-organization, spontaneous compartmentalization, and self-regulation. The model portraits the dynamics of an ensemble of…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…
The problem of evolutionary complexification of life is considered one of the fundamental aspects in contemporary evolutionary theory. Parasitism is ubiquitous, inevitable, and arises as soon as the first replicators appear, even during the…
Starting with a group of reinforcement-learning agents we derive coupled replicator equations that describe the dynamics of collective learning in multiagent systems. We show that, although agents model their environment in a…
Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…
The process of evolutionary emergence of purposeful adaptive behavior is investigated by means of computer simulations. The model proposed implies that there is an evolving population of simple agents, which have two natural needs: energy…
Spontaneous self-replication in cellular automata has long been considered rare, with most known examples requiring careful design or artificial initialization. In this paper, we present formal, causal evidence that such replication can…
Selection in a time-periodic environment is modeled via the two-player replicator dynamics. For sufficiently fast environmental changes, this is reduced to a multi-player replicator dynamics in a constant environment. The two-player terms…