Persistence, search and autopoiesis
Oliver Sharpe · 1999
The purpose of this paper is mainly to introduce the concept of 'persistence' into the discussion of dynamical systems and Artificial Life. First it is shown how persistence can be used to help understand the behaviour of evolutionary search algorithms. Then the notion of persistence is discussed in relation to the types of dynamical systems that will be capable of modelling autopoietic systems. It is argued that the first models of emergent autopoiesis will either require an exponential growth in the number of particles involved in the model or it will be based on some kind of search algorithm that approximates this growth.