As headlined on New Year's Day, 2024: We Are Going To Hear More And More About Digital Biology (NVDA).
And from New Scientist, July 9:
A digital "primordial soup" with no rules or direction can lead to the emergence of self-replicating artificial life forms, in an experiment that may hint at how biological life began on Earth
A self-replicating form of artificial life has arisen from a digital “primordial soup” of random data, despite a lack of explicit rules or goals to encourage such behaviour. Researchers believe it is possible that more sophisticated versions of the experiment could yield more advanced digital organisms, and if they did, the findings could shed light on the mechanisms behind the emergence of biological life on Earth.
While the process of evolution is well understood, little is known about how inert molecules first came together to form life. To investigate how humble beginnings can lead to complex ends, Ben Laurie at Google and his colleagues designed experiments where tens of thousands of separate pieces of computer code randomly mingled, combined and executed their instructions over millions of generations.
Because there were no rules to govern how the code samples should change and no rewards for certain behaviour, the researchers expected the population, which was capped at a fixed number, to remain random and do nothing coherent. But to their surprise, they found that the simulation eventually led to the emergence of self-replicating programs that quickly multiplied to hit the population cap. Eventually, new types of replicators emerged that competed for space and occasionally overwhelmed and replaced the previous population, just as biological organisms can outcompete each other.
This research is far from the first attempt at mimicking life digitally: for example, simulations such as the Game of Life, which has a grid of cells that are either “alive” or “dead” and are governed by simple rules, have shown self-replicating behaviour. Laurie says what makes this work unique is that the system had no formal rules, goals or processes to encourage or kick-start artificial life – it simply arrived. “It all fizzes around and then suddenly: boom, they’re all the same,” he says....
....MUCH MORE
