Thoughts on an Unified Framework for Artificial Chemistries

Artificial Chemistries (ACs) are symbolic chemical metaphors for the exploration of Artificial Life, with specific focus on the problem of biogenesis or the origin of life. This paper presents authors thoughts towards defining a unified framework to characterize and classify symbolic artificial chemistries by devising appropriate formalism to capture semantic and organizational information. We identify three basic high level abstractions in initial proposal for this framework viz., information, computation, and communication. We present an analysis of two important notions of information, namely, Shannon’s Entropy and Algorithmic Information, and discuss inductive and deductive approaches for defining the framework. ∗Work done when author was in NUS (2002-2005).