A New Self-Reproducing Cellular Automaton Capable of Construction and Computation
Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
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The study of self-replicating structures in Computer Science has been taking place for more than half a century, motivated by the desire to understand the fundamental principles and algorithms involved in self-replication. The bulk of the literature explores self-replicating forms in Cellular Automata. Though trivially self-replicating programs have been written for dozens of languages, very little work exists that explores self-replicating forms in programming languages.This paper reports initial investigations into self-replicating expressions in the Lambda Calculus, the basis for functional programming languages. Mimicking results from the work on Cellular Automata, self-replicating Lambda Calculus expressions that also allow the application of an arbitrary program to arbitrary data are presented. Standard normal order reduction, however, will not reduce the sub-expression representing the program application. Two approaches of dealing with this, hybrid reduction and parallel reduction, are discussed, and have been implemented in an interpreter.