Rethinking Self-Replication: Detecting Distributed Selfhood in the Outlier Cellular Automaton
Arend Hintze and Clifford Bohm
细胞自动机中的自发自我复制长期以来一直被认为是罕见的,大多数已知的例子都需要仔细的设计或人工初始化。 在本文中,我们提出了正式的因果证据,证明这种复制可以在无辅助的情况下出现 - 并且它可以以分布式,多组分的形式进行。 基于在Outlier规则中识别复杂动力学的先前工作的基础上,我们引入了一个数据驱动的框架,该框架重建了确定性细胞自动机中模式的完整因果祖先。 这使我们能够通过明确的因果谱系来严格识别自我复制的结构。 我们的结果表明,Outlier CA中的自我复制者不仅是自发和健壮的,而且通常由多个不连接的集群组成,这些集群协调工作,引发了对人工生命系统中一些传统的个性和复制概念的质疑。
Spontaneous self-replication in cellular automata has long been considered rare, with most known examples requiring careful design or artificial initialization. In this paper, we present formal, causal evidence that such replication can emerge unassisted – and that it can do so in a distributed, multi-component form. Building on prior work identifying complex dynamics in the Outlier rule, we introduce a data-driven framework that reconstructs the full causal ancestry of patterns in a determinist...