Autopoiesis aims to describe the organization and limits of living systems. Unfortunately, its theoretical development has largely been carried out verbally, with less focus on developing formal concepts of the key ideas, such as structure, organization, process, etc. Using toy models of emergent individuals allows us to fully characterize these concepts concretely. This paper generalizes previous work that analysed autopoiesis in the Game of Life. I use the Larger than Life family of cellular automata to explore how the concepts of production process, autopoietic network, and cognitive domain extend to this space, before moving to the continuum limit in RealLife — a continuous-space, discrete-time family of Euclidean automata.

PDF/TeX | DOI

Gaul, T. M. (2024). Autopoiesis in RealLife Euclidean automata. In Faíña, A., Risi, S., Medvet, E., Stoy, K., Chan, B., Miras, K., Zahadat, P., Grbic, D., and Nadazir, G. ALIFE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 Artificial Life Conference, pages 818-826. MIT Press.

@inproceedings{Gaul2024,
  author={Gaul, Thomas M},
  year = {2024},
  title={Autopoiesis in {RealLife} {E}uclidean automata},
  booktitle = {{ALIFE 2024}: Proceedings of the 2024 Artificial Life Conference},
  editor = {Faíña, Andrés and Risi, Sebastian and Medvet, Eric and Stoy, Kasper and Chan, Bert and Miras, Karine and Zahadat, Payam and Grbic, Djordje and Nadizar, Giorgia},
  pages = {818--826},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  doi = {10.1162/isal_a_00723}
}

Commentary

There is a pretty significant mathematical error in this paper, in Table 1. However, it doesn’t really matter all that much (if the paper matters at all). But for those who care, the correct formulas and their derivation are presented in my thesis work (Section A.3, Eqs. A.79-80, pg. 160–161).