人工化学中作为递归算法的自再生代谢的Emergence
Emergence of Self-Reproducing Metabolisms as Recursive Algorithms in an Artificial Chemistry
摘要：
人工生命的主要目标之一是研究生命出现的条件，不一定是它现在的样子，而是它可能的样子。人工化学是实现这一目的的最重要工具之一，因为它们为我们提供了一个基本框架，以研究在何种条件下能够自我复制并最终进化的代谢可以出现。虽然已经有一些成功的尝试，以产生涌现自我复制代谢的例子，但所涉及的一套规则仍然太复杂，无法揭示工作中的基本原理。在本文中，我们假设自我复制代谢出现所需的关键属性是存在一个自催化的图灵完全反应子集。我们验证了这一假设与最低限度的人工化学守恒定律，这是基于图灵完全重写系统称为组合逻辑。我们的实验表明，从一个白板状态开始，这种化学反应的一次运行，在没有外部干预的情况下，发现了广泛的涌现结构，包括在每个周期中自我复制的结构。所有这些结构都采用递归算法的形式，从环境中获取基本成分，并在与生物代谢非常相似的过程中分解它们。
英文摘要：
One of the main goals of Artificial Life is to research the conditions for the emergence of life, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be. Artificial Chemistries are one of the most important tools for this purpose because they provide us with a basic framework to investigate under which conditions metabolisms capable of reproducing themselves, and ultimately, of evolving, can emerge. While there have been successful attempts at producing examples of emergent self-reproducing metabolisms, the set of rules involved remain too complex to shed much light on the underlying principles at work. In this paper, we hypothesize that the key property needed for self-reproducing metabolisms to emerge is the existence of an auto-catalyzed subset of Turing-complete reactions. We validate this hypothesis with a minimalistic Artificial Chemistry with conservation laws, which is based on a Turing-complete rewriting system called Combinatory Logic. Our experiments show that a single run of this chemistry, starting from a tabula rasa state, discovers -- with no external intervention -- a wide range of emergent structures including ones that self-reproduce in each cycle. All of these structures take the form of recursive algorithms that acquire basic constituents from the environment and decompose them in a process that is remarkably similar to biological metabolisms.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
