Artificial cells as reified quines
Williams, Lance R. · 2011
Cellular automata were initially conceived as a formal model to study self-replicating systems.Although reproduction by biological cells is characterized by exponential population increase, no population of self-replicating machines modeled as a cellular automaton has ever exhibited such rapid growth.We believe this is due to the inability of cellular automata to model bonded complexes of reified actors undergoing random independent motion.To address this limitation, we introduce a model of parallel distributed spatial computation which is highly expressive, indefinitely scalable, and asynchronous.We then use this model to define two examples of self-replicating kinematic automata.These machines assemble copies of themselves from components supplied by diffusion and increase in number exponentially until the supply of components is depleted.Because they are both programmable constructors and selfdescriptions, we call them reified quines.