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Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms
Numerous varieties of life forms have filled the earth throughout evolution. Evolution consists of two processes: self-replication and interaction with the physical environment and other living things around it. Initiated by von Neumann et al. studies on self-replication in cellular automata have at...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9360575/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35957682 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.958069 |
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author | Xu, Wenli Wu, Chunrong Peng, Qinglan Lee, Jia Xia, Yunni Kawasaki, Shuji |
author_facet | Xu, Wenli Wu, Chunrong Peng, Qinglan Lee, Jia Xia, Yunni Kawasaki, Shuji |
author_sort | Xu, Wenli |
collection | PubMed |
description | Numerous varieties of life forms have filled the earth throughout evolution. Evolution consists of two processes: self-replication and interaction with the physical environment and other living things around it. Initiated by von Neumann et al. studies on self-replication in cellular automata have attracted much attention, which aim to explore the logical mechanism underlying the replication of living things. In nature, competition is a common and spontaneous resource to drive self-replications, whereas most cellular-automaton-based models merely focus on some self-protection mechanisms that may deprive the rights of other artificial life (loops) to live. Especially, Huang et al. designed a self-adaptive, self-replicating model using a greedy selection mechanism, which can increase the ability of loops to survive through an occasionally abandoning part of their own structural information, for the sake of adapting to the restricted environment. Though this passive adaptation can improve diversity, it is always limited by the loop’s original structure and is unable to evolve or mutate new genes in a way that is consistent with the adaptive evolution of natural life. Furthermore, it is essential to implement more complex self-adaptive evolutionary mechanisms not at the cost of increasing the complexity of cellular automata. To this end, this article proposes new self-adaptive mechanisms, which can change the information of structural genes and actively adapt to the environment when the arm of a self-replicating loop encounters obstacles, thereby increasing the chance of replication. Meanwhile, our mechanisms can also actively add a proper orientation to the current construction arm for the sake of breaking through the deadlock situation. Our new mechanisms enable active self-adaptations in comparison with the passive mechanism in the work of Huang et al. which is achieved by including a few rules without increasing the number of cell states as compared to the latter. Experiments demonstrate that this active self-adaptability can bring more diversity than the previous mechanism, whereby it may facilitate the emergence of various levels in self-replicating structures. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9360575 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93605752022-08-10 Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms Xu, Wenli Wu, Chunrong Peng, Qinglan Lee, Jia Xia, Yunni Kawasaki, Shuji Front Genet Genetics Numerous varieties of life forms have filled the earth throughout evolution. Evolution consists of two processes: self-replication and interaction with the physical environment and other living things around it. Initiated by von Neumann et al. studies on self-replication in cellular automata have attracted much attention, which aim to explore the logical mechanism underlying the replication of living things. In nature, competition is a common and spontaneous resource to drive self-replications, whereas most cellular-automaton-based models merely focus on some self-protection mechanisms that may deprive the rights of other artificial life (loops) to live. Especially, Huang et al. designed a self-adaptive, self-replicating model using a greedy selection mechanism, which can increase the ability of loops to survive through an occasionally abandoning part of their own structural information, for the sake of adapting to the restricted environment. Though this passive adaptation can improve diversity, it is always limited by the loop’s original structure and is unable to evolve or mutate new genes in a way that is consistent with the adaptive evolution of natural life. Furthermore, it is essential to implement more complex self-adaptive evolutionary mechanisms not at the cost of increasing the complexity of cellular automata. To this end, this article proposes new self-adaptive mechanisms, which can change the information of structural genes and actively adapt to the environment when the arm of a self-replicating loop encounters obstacles, thereby increasing the chance of replication. Meanwhile, our mechanisms can also actively add a proper orientation to the current construction arm for the sake of breaking through the deadlock situation. Our new mechanisms enable active self-adaptations in comparison with the passive mechanism in the work of Huang et al. which is achieved by including a few rules without increasing the number of cell states as compared to the latter. Experiments demonstrate that this active self-adaptability can bring more diversity than the previous mechanism, whereby it may facilitate the emergence of various levels in self-replicating structures. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-07-26 /pmc/articles/PMC9360575/ /pubmed/35957682 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.958069 Text en Copyright © 2022 Xu, Wu, Peng, Lee, Xia and Kawasaki. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Genetics Xu, Wenli Wu, Chunrong Peng, Qinglan Lee, Jia Xia, Yunni Kawasaki, Shuji Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title | Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title_full | Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title_fullStr | Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title_full_unstemmed | Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title_short | Enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
title_sort | enhancing the diversity of self-replicating structures using active self-adapting mechanisms |
topic | Genetics |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9360575/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35957682 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.958069 |
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