An Eventful Year So Far
17 October 2009
The SimSoup Open Ended Model Completed
Towards the end of last year, work started on making SimSoup more
open ended. The idea was to give Molecules structure, and to have
the structure of each Molecule Type determined by the model
iteslf. In addition, The Interaction Types that could take place
would depend on the structure of the Molecule Types involved.
The first version of the open-ended SimSoup was working in
April 2009; the model and some and preliminary results were
presented in the paper “SimSoup: Artificial Chemistry Meets
Pauling”. The paper is to be included in “Advances in
Artificial Life”, the proceedings of ECAL 2009, this
year’s European Conference on Artificial Life (follow the
Publications link on the left).
The main features of the open ended model are:
- Each Molecule Type has a two dimensional structure
- Molecules can Join or Split to form Molecules of different
types
- Joining and Splitting occur in ways that depend on the
structural properties of the Reactant(s)
The rules that determine the structure of Molecules and the way in
which they Join and Split are designed to be analogous to real
chemistry, while keeping the model conceptually simple and
computationally tractable. The key objective is to produce an open
ended model in which the opportunities for novelty are similar to
those that exist in real chemistry.
Levels of Selection Workshop at ECAL 2009
I attended the Levels of Selection and Individuality in Evolution
Workshop at ECAL 2009. There were a number of interesting
talks. The invited speaker, Eörs Szathmary gave a fascinating
talk on the current status of research into the Major Transitions
of Evolution.
I had an ‘extended abstract’ that was included as
a poster. Its called “The Origin Of Life: A Network Oriented
View”. It presents some of the ideas underpinning the
SimSoup project. In particular, the idea that properties of
chemical networks played a key role in the origin of the first
evolving systems. A mechanism for memory in chemical networks is
illustrated. The simplicity of ‘network memory’,
especially in comparison with mechanisms based on template
replicating molecules such as DNA and RNA, suggests its
plausibility as a prebiotic phenomenon and as a fruitful area for
Origin of Life research. The extended abstract is available at the
Publications link on the left.