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Artificial self-replication and evolution

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        <b>Artificial Self-Replication and Evolution</b>
      
      
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        <b>Hiroki Sayama</b>
      
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        Research on self-replicating and evolving artificial systems was founded by von Neumann in 
        the late '50s and now is renamed "Artificial Life". Von Neumann's monumental work of 
        self-reproducing automata and most of other succeeding works assumed uniformly arranged 
        cellular sites and discreteness of space / time / state of each site, which is called 
        Cellular Automata (CA). 
      
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        Earlier attempts to create artificial organisms using CA may be categorized into four 
        groups --- (1) implementation of universal constructors based on von Neumann's 
        self-reproducing automaton, (2) search for a minimal system capable of non-trivial 
        self-replication, (3) addition of other computational capabilities to self-replicators, 
        and (4) realization of emergence and evolution of self-replicators. (1), (2), and (3) are 
        efforts to implement regulated behavior (e.g. construction, self-replication, computation) 
        manually designed according to the designer's idea, while (4) strives to obtain unexpected 
        behavior (e.g. emergence of self-replicators or evolution) that may arise from robust or 
        random state-transition rules. 
      
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        This project belongs to the category (4), currently aiming at constructing evolutionary 
        systems on a simple, deterministic CA space. The final goals of this project are to give 
        some answer to the question whether the complexity-increasing evolution of artificial 
        organisms (the evolution of their ability to do more complicated things) is attainable 
        using CA or any artificial media, which has been an open question originally posed by von 
        Neumann himself at the beginning of this research field. 
      
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        The CA-based models proposed so far in the project are available in the subproject pages 
        below, while the other form of self-replication models, such as self-replication in a 
        kinematic universe, are also considered now. 
      
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        <b>Subprojects:</b>
      
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        <u>Structurally dissolvable self-reproducing loop & Evoloop <../../postdocs/sayama/sdsr/></u>
      
      
        
      
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        <u>Self-replicating worms with shape-encoding mechanism <../../postdocs/sayama/worms/></u>
      
      
        
      
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        <b>Papers:</b>
      
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        H. Sayama: Self-replicating worms that increase structural complexity through gene 
        transmission, 
      
      
        <i>Artificial Life VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Artificial 
        Life,</i>
      
      
         M. A. Bedau, J. S. McCaskill, N. H. Packard and S. Rasmussen, eds., pp.21-30, 2000, MIT 
        Press. 
      
      
        <u>PDF file <../../postdocs/sayama/worms/sayamaAL7.pdf></u>
      
      
         
      
      
        <u>PostScript (gzipped) <../../postdocs/sayama/worms/sayamaAL7.ps.gz></u>
      
      
         
      
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        H. Sayama: A new structurally dissolvable self-reproducing loop evolving in a simple 
        cellular automata space, 
      
      
        <i>Artificial Life</i>
      
      
         
      
      
        <b>5</b>
      
      
        :4, pp.343-365, 1999. 
      
      
        <u>Full text (PDF file) <http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/ARTL/sample-article.html></u>
      
      
         
      
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        H. Sayama: Spontaneous evolution of self-reproducing loops on cellular automata, 
      
      
        <u>InterJournal <http://www.interjournal.org/></u>
      
      
        , 
      
      
        <u>Brief Article 236 <http://interjournal.org/cgi-bin/manuscript_abstract.cgi?25739></u>
      
      
        , accepted.
      
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