Fifty years of research on self-replication: an overview
Artificial Life - Special issue on self-replication
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Introduction to creative evolutionary systems
Creative evolutionary systems
A new kind of science
An interactive self-replicator implemented in hardware
Artificial Life
A New Self-Reproducing Cellular Automaton Capable of Construction and Computation
Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
Evolvable self-replicating molecules in an artificial chemistry
Artificial Life
Interactive self-replicating, self-incrementing and self-decrementing loops
ICAL 2003 Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Artificial life
Cellular Automata
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Genetic Algorithms in Electromagnetics
Genetic Algorithms in Electromagnetics
Schema theory for genetic programming with one-point crossover and point mutation
Evolutionary Computation
An implementation of von neumann's self-reproducing machine
Artificial Life
Constructibility of signal-crossing solutions in von neumann 29-state cellular automata
ICCS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computational Science - Volume Part II
Long-term evolutionary dynamics in heterogeneous cellular automata
Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
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Cellular automata models have historically been a major approach to studying the information-processing properties of self-replication. Here we explore the feasibility of adopting genetic programming so that, when it is given a fairly arbitrary initial cellular automata configuration, it will automatically generate a set of rules that make the given configuration replicate. We found that this approach works surprisingly effectively for structures as large as 50 components or more. The replication mechanisms discovered by genetic programming work quite differently than those of many past manually designed replicators: There is no identifiable instruction sequence or construction arm, the replicating structures generally translate and rotate as they reproduce, and they divide via a fissionlike process that involves highly parallel operations. This makes replication very fast, and one cannot identify which descendant is the parent and which is the child. The ability to automatically generate self-replicating structures in this fashion allowed us to examine the resulting replicators as their properties were systematically varied. Further, it proved possible to produce replicators that simultaneously deposited secondary structures while replicating, as in some past manually designed models. We conclude that genetic programming is a powerful tool for studying self-replication that might also be profitably used in contexts other than cellular spaces.