2021/03/15 by Lance R. Williams, Williams, Lance R.
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #DNA and Biological Computing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE) #Origins and Evolution of Life #Protist diversity and phylogeny
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2103.08406
openalex publication_date 2021/03/15 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Replication time is among the most important components of a bacterial cell's\nreproductive fitness. Paradoxically, larger cells replicate in less time than\nsmaller cells despite the fact that building a larger cell requires increased\nquantities of raw materials and energy. This feat is primarily accomplished by\nthe massive over expression of ribosomes, which permits translation of mRNA\ninto protein, the limiting step in reproduction, to occur at a scale that would\nbe impossible were it not for the use of parallel processing. In computer\nscience, spatial parallelism is the distribution of work across the nodes of a\ndistributed-memory multicomputer system. Despite the fact that a non-negligible\nfraction of artificial life research is grounded in formulations based on\nspatially parallel substrates, there have been no examples of artificial\norganisms that use spatial parallelism to replicate in less time than smaller\norganisms. This paper describes artificial cells defined using a\ncombinator-based artificial chemistry that replicate in less time than smaller\ncells. This is achieved by employing extra copies of programs implementing the\nlimiting steps in the process used by the cells to synthesize their component\nparts. Significant speedup is demonstrated, despite the increased complexity of\ncontrol and export processes necessitated by the use of a parallel replication\nstrategy.\n