EMERGENCE OF UNICELLULAR ORGANISMS FROM A SIMPLE GENERALIZED CELLULAR AUTOMATA

The goal of this letter is to report a novel class of dynamical behaviors observed from a generalized cellular automata CNN [Chua, 1998] with piecewise-linear (PWL) cells. Starting from an almost homogeneous initial condition, self-making (autopoietic in the sense of [Varela et al., 1974]) patterns, reminiscent of simple living systems, emerge as a result of the nonlinear coupling among cells. Similar to patterns of organization characterizing living systems, our patterns display features such as growth, maturity and death. The discovery of such patterns was made possible via mutations in several piecewise-linear CNN cell realizations of the "Game of Life" [Conway, 1982].