Permutation City

by Greg Egan

The Autoverse was meant to provide a compromise between real-world chemistry – difficult and expensive to manipulate and monitor in test-tube experiments, and hideously slow to compute in faithful simulations – and the tantalizing abstractions of the earliest “artificial life”: computer viruses, genetic algorithms, self-replicating machines embedded in simple cellular automaton worlds; all trivially easy to compute, but unable to throw much light on the genesis of real-world molecular biology. Lambert had spent a decade trying to find conditions which would lead to the spontaneous appearance of Autoverse life, without success. He’d constructed A. lamberti – a twelve-year project – to reassure himself that his goal wasn’t absurd; to demonstrate that a living organism could at least function in the Autoverse, however it had come to be there. A. lamberti had permanently side-tracked him; he’d never returned to his original research.