{"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/evolutionary-self-replication-as-a-mechanism","title":"Evolutionary Self-Replication as a Mechanism for Producing Artificial Intelligence","arxiv_id":"2109.08057","date":"2021-09-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Samuel Schmidgall","Joseph Hays"],"abstract":"Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely on survival, while undergoing natural selection, evolved organisms are shown to produce meaningful, complex, and intelligent behavior, demonstrating creative solutions to challenging problems without any notion of reward or objectives. Atari and robotic learning environments are re-defined in terms of natural selection, and the behavior which emerged in self-replicating organisms during these experiments is described in detail.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08057v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.08057v5.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":"evolutionary-self-replication-as-a-mechanism","repo_url":"https://github.com/samuelschmidgall/evolutionaryselfreplication","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"atari-games","task_name":"Atari Games"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}