Scientific understanding of life’s origins and open-ended change

Establish a scientific understanding of the phenomenon of life, including the origins of life and the mechanisms enabling life’s open-ended change, to resolve the identified open challenge in explaining these aspects of living systems.

Background

The paper motivates the use of artificial life and computational models to explore fundamental questions about life that cannot be addressed by direct comparative study due to the single lineage of terrestrial life. The authors frame the study by noting that core aspects of life, such as its origins and capacity for open-ended change, are not yet adequately understood and remain an open challenge for science.

This broad unresolved question anchors the motivation for employing synthetic approaches and the self-optimization Hopfield Network model to investigate related phenomena such as agency and creativity in living and artificial systems.