Autocatalytic Replication of Polymers Revisited

摘要

A simple computational model for the emergence of autocatalytic sets as described in (Farmer et al., 1986) is re-implemented. Results are found to generally agree with the major theme in the original work: increasing the initial polymer variety in a toy chemical soup scenario increases the likelihood that a complex autocatalytic set will suddenly bootstrap itself into existence. Quantitatively, however, critical probabilities derived from this careful re-implementation are very much higher than those reported in the original work. A full resolution is not reached, but a theoretical argument supports the simulation results gained in this instance.