Life as Evolving Software

The following sections are included:

• Turing as a Biologist

• Introduction to this Paper

• History of Metabiology

• Modeling Evolution

  • Software organisms

  • The hill-climbing algorithm

  • Fitness

  • What is a mutation?

  • Mutation distance

  • Hidden use of oracles

• Model A (Naming Integers) Exhaustive Search

  • The Busy Beaver function

  • Proof of Theorem 1 (exhaustive search)

• Model A (Naming Integers) Intelligent Design

  • Another Busy Beaver function

  • Improving lower bounds on Ω

  • Proof of Theorem 2 (intelligent design)

• Model A (Naming Integers) Cumulative Evolution at Random

• Model B (Naming Functions)

• Remarks on Model C (Naming Ordinals)

• Conclusion

• Appendix. AIT in a Nutshell

• References