{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/computational-life-how-well-formed-self","title":"Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction","arxiv_id":"2406.19108","date":"2024-06-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Blaise Agüera y Arcas","Jyrki Alakuijala","James Evans","Ben Laurie","Alexander Mordvintsev","Eyvind Niklasson","Ettore Randazzo","Luca Versari"],"abstract":"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 appears. While there are some hypotheses regarding how self-replicators arose in nature, we know very little about the general dynamics, computational principles, and necessary conditions for self-replicators to emerge. This is especially true on \"computational substrates\" where interactions involve logical, mathematical, or programming rules. In this paper we take a step towards understanding how self-replicators arise by studying several computational substrates based on various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets. We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. We demonstrate how this occurs due to random interactions and self-modification, and can happen with and without background random mutations. We also show how increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators. Finally, we show a counterexample of a minimalistic programming language where self-replicators are possible, but so far have not been observed to arise.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"computational-life-how-well-formed-self","repo_url":"https://github.com/paradigms-of-intelligence/cubff","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"computational-life-how-well-formed-self","repo_url":"https://github.com/znah/zff","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"artificial-life","task_name":"Artificial Life"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"non","method_name":"NON"},{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}