Thinking about
replicators in Conway's Game of Life made me wonder about whether one would expect them to emerge eventually and become dominant in a very, very, very long-lived "random soup" situation.
I actually doubt it. All life on Earth seems to have common ancestry, and a likely reason is that once life arose once, it quickly ate up all the stuff lying around that would be useful raw materials for abiogenesis a second time. In Life, though, there's no competition for raw materials; there's just competition for room. And there are simple spacefiller and breeder patterns that already expand into the plane at a population rate proportional to t
2, which is the fastest anything can ever expand in a 2D cellular automaton with local rules. They could outcompete any complicated replicator, which would likely reproduce at t
2 at best but with a lower constant of proportionality. And simple spacefillers or breeders would be much, much more likely to arise by chance.
On the other hand, there's the question of robustness. Generally speaking, these patterns are fragile; they can't productively expand into a region filled with the static and oscillating junk left over from a random soup. Maybe some suitably adapted replicator could do better.
Or maybe there are breeders that are particularly aggressive on junk. This is probably ripe for experiment, if somebody hasn't done it already.
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