Artificial chemistry

An artificial chemistry is a chemical-like system that usually consists of objects, called molecules, that interact according to rules resembling chemical reaction rules. Artificial chemistries are created and studied in order to understand fundamental properties of chemical systems, including prebiotic evolution, as well as for developing chemical computing systems. Artificial chemistry is a field within computer science wherein chemical reactions—often biochemical ones—are computer-simulated, yielding insights on evolution, self-assembly, and other biochemical phenomena. The field does not use actual chemicals, and should not be confused with either synthetic chemistry or computational chemistry. Rather, bits of information are used to represent the starting molecules, and the end products are examined along with the processes that led to them. The field originated in artificial life but has shown to be a versatile method with applications in many fields such as chemistry, economics, sociology and linguistics.

An artificial chemistry is defined in general as a triple (S,R,A). In some cases it is sufficient to define it as a tuple (S,I).

Artificial chemistries emerged as a sub-field of artificial life, in particular from strong artificial life. The idea behind this field was that if one wanted to build something alive, it had to be done by a combination of non-living entities. For instance, a cell is itself alive, and yet is a combination of non-living molecules. Artificial chemistry enlists, among others, researchers that believe in an extreme bottom-up approach to artificial life. In artificial life, bits of information were used to represent bacteria or members of a species, each of which moved, multiplied, or died in computer simulations. In artificial chemistry bits of information are used to represent starting molecules capable of reacting with one another. The field has pertained to artificial intelligence by virtue of the fact that, over billions of years, non-living matter evolved into primordial life forms which in turn evolved into intelligent life forms.

The first reference about Artificial Chemistries come from a Technical paper written by John McCaskill .Walter Fontana working with Leo Buss then took up the work developing the AlChemy model . The model was presented at the second International Conference of Artificial Life. In his first papers he presented the concept of organization, as a set of molecules that is algebraically closed and self-maintaining. This concept was further developed by Dittrich and Speroni di Fenizio into a theory of chemical organizations .

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