Self‐organizing genetic codes and the emergence of digital life

Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of self‐replicating programs from an initially disordered “prebiotic” phase consisting of randomly generated opcodes (virtual machine instructions) is a challenging problem. The computer world, Amoeba, has many virtual CPUs acting upon sequences of randomly generated codons (opcode templates). An assignment matrix degenerately maps these codons to a genetic basis set of opcodes, analogous to the translation of nucleotides to amino acids. Amoeba self‐organizes by increasing assignment probabilities for those codon‐opcode pairs in successfully generated children. This halves the effective size of the opcode basis set, doubling the rate of emergence over the control case (random assignments). © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.