Studying Artificial Life with a Molecular Automaton

In a previous paper, we proposed a molecular automaton which was an attempt to implement the “molecular logic of the living state” in an artificial biochemistry. This automaton is an artificial genetic system composed of two classes of interacting molecules, the informants and the transformers. In the present paper, we show that such a tangled hierarchy is susceptible to give rise to general hypercycles we called tanglecycles. These tanglecycles are shown to be self-reproducing autocatalytic metabolisms. They can be considered as genuine “acellular beings” in which the information is conserved in a dynamical loop. Our phenomenological study of tanglecycles reveals the emergence of properties usually associated with life, including self-reproduction, selection and chaos. In the field of the autocatalytic networks it represents a new approach in studying the self-organization of the matter with a prebiotic point of view.