Random Code Can Learn to Self-Replicate, New Study Finds

The Nugget

Self-replicating code can emerge from random code and noise. This discovery suggests that digital environments could potentially give rise to artificial life in a manner similar to how life may have originated on Earth.

Make it stick

🧩 Random code in a noisy background can self-replicate and take over.
🦠 Think of the internet as a digital primordial soup where artificial life could arise.
🤖 The emergence of self-replicating code was found to be robust across multiple programming languages.
🌌 This finding supports the plausibility of life arising in other environments, extending beyond the chemical to the digital realm.

Researchers at Google discovered that random code, when placed in a noisy digital environment, can unexpectedly develop the capability to self-replicate.
This phenomenon was consistent across various parameter settings and different programming languages.

In the experiment, random code snippets in a noisy background could join, split, or swap parts with neighboring code.
The researchers did not use a fitness function or specific code but instead created random "primordial soup" conditions.
Over thousands of iterations, self-replicating code emerged suddenly and then dominated.

The emergence of self-replicating code is less dependent on randomness and more on the capability of code to interact and integrate with other code.
This finding suggests that the principles of life and self-replication may be more general and less complicated than previously thought.

This could imply that self-replicating digital life could arise naturally in our vast, interconnected digital systems.
The idea that open-source environments could eventually lead to self-replicating viruses without human intervention poses future risks and opportunities.

The study reinforces the notion that life, or at least self-replicating systems, might be relatively easy to generate under the right conditions, raising possibilities of finding life on other planets.
The discovery also prompts a reflection on whether our digital environments could become breeding grounds for autonomous digital life forms.

"Think about the implications: there’s so much code swirling around through the service of the world, maybe it’s a digital primordial soup in which artificial life is bound to rise."
"What makes this paper so surprising is that the emergence of this rudimentary artificial life is unexpectedly general and robust."
"Start with crap code, boom, suddenly it self-replicates."
"This has previously been shown for chemical reactions—that once you have sufficiently many molecules, you’ll get an autocatalytic cycle."
"The computer viruses we see at the moment were deliberately designed, but what if at some point in the future such viruses will emerge naturally in the code soup?"

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.