Spontaneous evolution of self-reproducing loops on cellular automata
Hiroki Sayama
New England Complex Systems Institute
24 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
sayama@necsi.org
Presented at the Second International Conference on Complex
Systems, Nashua, New Hampshire, Oct 1998, and accepted as a Brief Article
in the InterJournal (manuscript no. 236).
Abstract
A simple evolutionary system "evoloop" implemented on a
deterministic nine-state five-neighbor cellular automata (CA) space is
introduced. This model was realized by improving the structurally
dissolvable self-reproducing loop I had previously contrived after
Langton's self-reproducing loop. The principal role of this
improvement is to enhance the adaptability (a degree of the variety of
situations in which structures in the CA space can operate regularly)
of the self-reproductive mechanism of loops. The experiment with
evoloop met with the intriguing result that the loops
spontaneously varied through direct interaction of their phenotypes,
smaller individuals were naturally selected, and the whole population
gradually evolved toward the smallest ones. This result shows that it is
possible to construct evolutionary systems on such a simple mathematical
medium as a CA space by introducing the mortality of individuals, their
interaction, and their robustness to variations into the model.
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