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In an experiment that simulated what would happen if you left a bunch of random data alone for millions of generations, Google researchers say they witnessed the emergence of self-replicating digital lifeforms. And their findings, published as a"Managing to evolve self-replicating programs from random starting points is a great achievement," Susan Stepney at the University of York, UK, who was not involved in the study,.
Laurie and his team's simulation is a digital primordial soup of sorts. No rules were imposed, and no impetus was given to the random data. To keep things as lean as possible, they used a funky programming language called, which to use the researchers' words is known for its "obscure minimalism," allowing for only two mathematical operations: adding one or subtracting one.
The long and short of it is that they modified it to only allow the random data — stand-ins for molecules — to interact with each other, "left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions."that he believes the findings show that there are "inherent mechanisms" that allow life to form. But self-replication in itself is not life — we should also be seeing an increase in the complexity of the organisms, according to experts.
"The complexity, as they measure it, goes up after the onset of the self-replicator. But it's not clear that it 'takes off' in an interesting way," Richard Watson at the University of Southampton, UK, who was not involved in the study, told. "Self-replication is important, but it would be a mistake to believe it's a magic bullet from which everything else that's exciting about life follows automatically".
Some of that may be due to practical limitations. Laurie believes that, given enough computing power — they were already pushing it with billions of steps per second on a laptop — they would've seen more complex programs pop up. Give it another go with beefier hardware, and we could well see something more lifelike come to be.
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