We consider the dynamics of artificial chemistry systems consisting of small, interacting neural-network particles. Although recent explorations into properties of such systems have shown interesting phenomena, like self-replication tendencies, social interplay, and the ability for multi-objective applications, most of these settings are reasoned about in the abstract weight space. We extend this setup to involve an applied, stateful positioning task with mutual dependencies and show that stable configurations can be found jointly in both the weight space and 3D space. We show that the main contributing factor is enabling the networks to self-adapt their interaction rates depending on their internal stability or their ability to position themselves correctly. We find that this method effectively prepares the network assembly against potentially destabilizing interactions, promoting emergent stability while preventing convergence to trivial states.

We consider various setups where large language models (LLMs) communicate solely with themselves or other LLMs. In accordance with similar results known for program representations (like λ-expressions or automata), we observe a natural tendency for the evolution of self-replicating text pieces, i.e., LLM prompts that cause any receiving LLM to produce a response similar to the original prompt. We argue that the study of these self-replicating patterns, which exist in natural language and across different types of LLMs, may have important implications on artificial intelligence, cultural studies, and related fields.

A recent branch of research in artificial life has constructed artificial chemistry systems whose particles are dynamic neural networks. These particles can be applied to each other and show a tendency towards self-replication of their weight values. We define new interactions for said particles that allow them to recognize one another and learn predictors for each other’s behavior. For instance, each particle minimizes its surprise when observing another particle’s behavior. Given a special catalyst particle to exert evolutionary selection pressure on the soup of particles, these ‘social’ interactions are sufficient to produce emergent behavior similar to the stability pattern previously only achieved via explicit self-replication training.

Self-replicating neural networks can be trained to output a representation of themselves, making them navigate towards non-trivial fixpoints in their weight space. We explore the problem of adding a secondary functionality to the primary task of replication. We find a successful solution in training the networks with separate input/output vectors for one network trained in both tasks so that the additional task does not hinder (and even stabilizes) the self-replication task. Furthermore, we observe the interaction of our goal-networks in an artificial chemistry environment. We examine the influence of different action parameters on the population and their effects on the group's learning capability. Lastly we show the possibility of safely guiding the whole group to goal-fulfilling weight configurations via the inclusion of one specially-developed guiding particle that is able to propagate a secondary task to its peers.