This project provides a (optionally) CUDA-based implementation of a self-modifying soup of programs which show emergence of self-replicators. Most experiments in the "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction" paper (arxiv link (https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108) were done using this code.
On debian-based systems, install build-essential and libbrotli-dev (and optionally CUDA):
sudo apt install build-essential libbrotli-dev
On Arch Linux, install the brotli and base-devel packages.
The project also provides a flake.nix file, so you may also make the
dependencies available with Nix using nix develop.
Compile the code by running make (for the CUDA-enabled version) or make CUDA=0.
You can then run a simulation, for example with
bin/main --lang bff_noheads
The file cubff.py provides an example of how to use the Python bindings.