There is a tension between biology's emphasis on perpetuation and the change required by biologically-inspired evolutionary algorithms. But there were radical changes when life first emerged from a prebiotic soup of chemicals. We investigate the possibility of taking ideas about the origin of life to develop a novel general purpose constructive search technique, inspired by ideas from autocatalytic reaction networks. Reactions combine partial solutions into fuller solutions; the reaction rates are catalysed by the products' fitnesses.
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@inproceedings(SS-UC-ECAL05, author = "Andrew Weeks and Susan Stepney", title = "Artificial catalysed reaction networks for search", crossref = "ACA-ECAL05" ) @proceedings(ACA-ECAL05, title = "ECAL Workshop on Artificial Chemistry", booktitle = "ECAL Workshop on Artificial Chemistry", year = 2005 )