Autopoiesis in RealLife Euclidean automata
Thomas M. Gaul
In ALIFE 2024: Proceedings of the 2024 Artificial Life Conference, 2024
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.
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.