Robust self-replication in living systems

Establish robust self-replication in living systems by identifying mechanisms or models that achieve reliable self-reproduction with robustness properties comparable to those sought in cellular automaton frameworks such as Gács' construction.

Background

The paper motivates its paper by contrasting the instability of classical cellular automata (e.g., von Neumann’s construction) under noise with Gács’ result demonstrating a one-dimensional cellular automaton capable of robust self-regeneration under arbitrarily high noise levels. While the authors focus on simulating Gray’s simplified version of Gács’ automaton and studying its error-correction behavior, they frame the broader biological question of achieving robust self-replication as unresolved.

This contextualizes their computational work as a step toward understanding robustness mechanisms that might inform models of living systems, where maintaining functional structure in the presence of perturbations remains a central challenge.