New paper: self-replicating programs evolve cooperation under a shared energy budget
irinarish · x · 2026-09-12
A retweet chain around Kunal et al.'s new paper "Tapes Together Strong" (Autopoietic Game Theory): in a soup of randomly mutating programs where computation costs energy, self-replicating programs eventually dominate — but can they learn to cooperate? The setup gives social behavior, computation, and reproduction a single energy budget, with programs able to share or steal energy. The result: agents evolve not just replication but cooperation, even coordinating collective complex behaviors. The work unites A-life and game theory to study the evolution of cooperation.
Related event: New Paper Shows Self-Replicating Programs Spontaneously Evolve Cooperation(3 posts)→
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