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VON NEUMANN'S CREATURE. "For decades von Neumann's virtual creature was reviewed, criticized and reworked, but still no one actually attempted to implement an artificial creature able to reproduce itself. Chris Langton, took it upon himself to create a creature that fulfilled Von Neumann's criteria of reproduction." https://lnkd.in/dSdcD2A View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY AND INFORMATION. "Around 1950 mathematicians and computer scientists began studying artificial self replicating systems in order to gain a deeper understanding of complex systems and the fundamental information processing principles involved in self replication." https://lnkd.in/dAx3RM7 View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC RESPONSES. "Pargellis envisages chips with simple instruction sets, whose programs dynamically mutate in response to environmental stimuli." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

SIMPLIFYING EFFICIENCY. "Pargellis found that on average, a self-replicating sequence of instructions would spontaneously arise after about 400 generations. Initially, such 'self-reps' were often unnecessarily complex, and contained portions of code which performed no useful task, or were skipped over. This is directly analagous to the 'introns' and 'exons' found in real biological genes, where useful genetic information is interspersed with patches of nonsense." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

SIMPLICITY AND ABUNDANCE. "One reason for Amoeba's fecundity is that its life-forms have a simple structure. Pergellis has carefully designed his instruction set such that it is possible to create a self-replicating cell with only 5 instructions." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL DEATH. "The concept of death in cellular automata is just as important as self-reproduction. Death is important to realize for natural selection, which is based on the survival of fitter organisms. Realization of death can be functional or structural." https://lnkd.in/dSdcD2A View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY OF STRUCTURES. "This paper will delve more deeply into the origin of natural products with an emphasis on the fundamental problem of just how such an extraordinary and bewildering array of structure types has arisen through evolutionary processes." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

SIZE REDUCTION AT A COST. "Langton observed that the capability of computational universality found in the self-reproducing automata of von Neumann is not known to be present in any self-replicating molecules or in the biological structure of any known living entity. Consequently, Langton achieved a substantial reduction in size by abandoning computation universality." https://lnkd.in/dSdcD2A View in LinkedIn

REPLICONS ALONE. "Langton and his successors Byl, Reggia et al., developed self-replicating automata which are much simpler than the universal constructor. These machines, however, lack any computing and constructing capabilities, their sole functionality being that of self-replication." https://lnkd.in/dvjjarA View in LinkedIn

INSUFFICIENT. "Langton observed that although the capacity for universal construction, as studied by von Neumann and Codd, is a sufficient condition for self-replication, it is not a necessary one. Furthermore, natural systems are probably not capable of universal construction." https://lnkd.in/dvjjarA View in LinkedIn