Typogenentics is an attempt to change the rules of genetics into a formal system. The idea was invented by Douglas Hofstadter, and written down in his famous book Godel, Escher, Back. When I read about the system a few days ago I coudn’t help wondering about using the system to test all those RNA world theories for the origin of life. Like for example programming the rules into a genetic algorithm that looks for self replicating strings in typogenetics. But after a few searches on google I found out someone did just that:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/hons/projects/1999/Andrew.Snare/
There are also some papers writen about the subject:
A study of Replicators and Hypercycles in Typogenetics form the journal: European Conference on Artificial Life
But what about adding some thermodynamics laws in the system and seeing if replicators come out without using any fitness function? That could be a more relevant simulation. Here’s a nice page about that:
