The coreworld: emergence and evolution of cooperative structures in a computational chemistry
CNLS '89 Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies on Self-organizing, Collective, and Cooperative Phenomena in Natural and Artificial Computing Networks on Emergent computation
Genetic programming: on the programming of computers by means of natural selection
Genetic programming: on the programming of computers by means of natural selection
Artificial chemistries—a review
Artificial Life
Digital life behavior in the amoeba world
Artificial Life
Genetic Programming and Autoconstructive Evolution with the Push Programming Language
Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
The Push3 execution stack and the evolution of control
GECCO '05 Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
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The desire to start evolution from scratch inside a computer memory is as old as computing. Here we demonstrate how viable computer programs can be established de novo in a Precambrian environment without supplying any specific instantiation, just starting with random bit sequences. These programs are not self-replicators, but act much more like catalysts. The microcontrollers used in the end are the result of a long series of simplifications. The objective of this simplification process was to produce universal machines with a human-readable interface, allowing software and/or hardware evolution to be studied. The power of the instruction set can be modified by introducing a secondary structure-folding mechanism, which is a state machine, allowing nontrivial replication to emerge with an instruction width of only a few bits. This state-machine approach not only attenuates the problems of brittleness and encoding functionality (too few bits available for coding, and too many instructions needed); it also enables the study of hardware evolution as such. Furthermore, the instruction set is sufficiently powerful to permit external signals to be processed. This information-theoretic approach forms one vertex of a triangle alongside artificial cell research and experimental research on the creation of life. Hopefully this work helps develop an understanding of how information-in a similar sense to the account of functional information described by Hazen et al.-is created by evolution and how this information interacts with or is embedded in its physico-chemical environment.