The Emergence of Replication in a Digital Evolution System using a Secondary Structure Approach

Spontaneous emergence of non self-replication in a microcontroller based artificial chemistry model, with replication being a concerted action of several sequential microprocesses or instructions, is a difficult problem. The choice of programming language that is used to realize replication as a sequence of instructions is to a certain extent arbitrarily. The question is, how many bits have to be found by a dynamical system in the right spaceand time-context to instantiate this replication. A secondary structure is introduced to allow complex instruction sets to be used. The secondary-structure folding mechanism, a directed graph or Moore automaton, allows replication to emerge with an arbitrary instructionwidth. The question of whether there is anything before emergence of replication has a tentative answer: early precursors of replication probably do not exist. Replication only starts when at least two replicating programs are in the same neighborhood replicating each other. A “cloud” of potential precursors of replication is not visible.

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