I got interested into reading about Molecular Biology lately. An area of particular interest for me is how early life emerged on our planet. There are so many fascinating theories out there! One in particular that caught my eye was a study about ‘Computational Life’¹.

Quite similar to the game of life, the study places computational cells in a grid where they can interact with nearby cells. However this time every cell contains a 64 byte long program written in a language similar to Brainfuck. At every computation step the program is executed while it is allowed to interact and override neighbor cells.

The interesting thing, according to the paper, is that given that setup ‘self-replicators’ arise! (They also have a video showing the self-replication linked in their paper.)

As they generously made the code publicly available² I thought I would give it a try to implement it in WASM for a real-time demo running in the browser.

If you wait long enough self-replicators should arise (probably…)

Sources and Annotations

Footnotes

1. ALAKUIJALA, Jyrki, et al. Computational life: How well-formed, self-replicating programs emerge from simple interaction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.19108, 2024. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.19108 ↩

2. https://github.com/paradigms-of-intelligence/cubff ↩