Evolution of Fault-tolerant Self-replicating Structures

Designed and evolved self-replicating structures in cellular automata have been extensively studied in the past as models of Artificial Life. However, CAs, unlike their biological counterpart, are very brittle: any faulty cell usually leads to the complete destruction of any emerging structures, let alone self-replicating structures. A way to design fault-tolerant structures based on error-correcting-code has been presented recently[l], but it required a cumbersome work to be put into practice. In this paper, we get back to the original inspiration for these works, nature, and propose a way to evolve self-replicating structures, faults here being only an idiosyncracy of the environment

Arithmetic Operations On Self-Replicating Cellular Automata

In this paper, we present a possible implementation of arithmetic functions (notably, addition and multiplication) using self-replicating cellular automata. The operations are performed by storing a dedicated program (sequence of states) on self-replicating loops, and letting the loops retrieve the operands, exchange data among themselves, and perform the calculations according to a set of rules. To determine the rules required for addition and multiplication, we exploited an existing algorithm for computation in the cellular automata environment and adapted it to exploit the features of self-replicating loops. This approach allowed us to study a variety of issues (synchronization, data exchange, etc.) related to the use of self-replicating machines for complex operations

Self-replication, Evolvability and Asynchronicity in Stochastic Worlds

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