Open-ended novelty is one of the goals of ALife. This provides challenges for analysis as the system evolves. We provide definitions for several emergent properties, such as parasitism and hypercycles, observed to emerge in an RNA world configuration of the Stringmol automata chemistry, and show how these can simultaneously be mathematically simple, capture the complexity of the processes, and be readily implementable.

Open-ended novelty is one of the goals of ALife. We use a recent definition of open-endedness, stated in terms of system models and meta-models, to demonstrate how the Stringmol Automata Chemistry achieves variation, innovation and emergence in a replicator-parasite system. We also show how Stringmol's self-modifying code allows certain of these novelties to be exploited within the system itself, while others are only externally observed.

Computational reflection uses software architectures that are capable of self- modification at runtime. These systems have implementations between two extremes: procedural reflection, in which unlimited self-modification is available at the expense of infinite recursion; and declarative reflection, which uses pre-defined metrics to drive the self-modification and is hence limited in scope. Biological processes also exploit the concept of reflection, where natural selection drives the process of modification. The concept of a program in computing has an analogy with an individual member of a species. The process of life is discretised into a series of autonomous systems, each of which creates modified versions of itself as offspring. This paper unifies the concept of computational reflection with biological systems via a new analysis of von Neumanns Universal Constructor. The result is a bio-reflective architecture that is capable of unconstrained self-modification without the problems of infinite recursion that exist in the computational counterparts. The new architecture is a blueprint for applications in Artificial Life studies, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence.