Spontaneous Emergence of Self-Replicating Structures in Molecube Automata

We propose and implement a discrete, two-dimensional evolutionary simulation of large numbers of interacting robotic modules called “molecubes,” which were shown empirically to have self-replicating ability (Zykov et al. 2005). In this simulation, the spontaneous and continuous emergence of large numbers of simple self-replicating molecube structures is observed without any explicit selection for this behavior. A quantitative comparison of structures’ self-replicability is investigated using a universal self-replication metric (Bryant and Lipson 2003), as well as the existence of interacting structure groups. Because of the discrete nature of the simulation and simple interactions, it bears strong resemblance to nonuniform cellular automata (Sipper 1995).