Emergence of Self-Replicating Loops in an Interactive, Hardware-Implemented Game-of-Life Environment - Cellular Automata - page 124

In our previous work we described the design of a simple 2 × 2 self-replicating
loop that can be physically activated by the user [10]. In this paper we present the
emergence of this interactive self-replicating loop in a Game-of-Life (or, simply,
Life) environment [11]. Contrary to the spontaneous emergence demonstrated
by Chou and Reggia [12], the user can physically induce the creation of the loop
and then control the loop's replication and destruction, two mechanisms which
are explained in Section 3. Section 4 presents the detection of the loop in the Life
context and the switching to the loop context. Section 5 discusses the hardware
implementation of the loop in the interactive reconfigurable computing tissue for
bio-inspired applications, the BioWall. Finally, we present concluding remarks
in Section 6.

Fig. 1. The BioWall, an interactive reconfigurable computing tissue of 80 × 25 = 2000
cells (Photograph by A. Herzog).

2An Interactive Reconfigurable Computing Tissue

The BioWall 1 (bio-inspired electronic wall) is an ongoing project in our labora-
tory. This wall, first designed to implement an electronic watch with self-repair
and self-healing capabilities [13], constitutes a reconfigurable computing tissue

1

European patent No 01201221.7.