From Barticelli's 1953 experiments
Before there was Wolfram’s class 4 cellular automata, before there was Conway’s Game of Life, there was Nils Aall Barricelli and his bionumeric organisms. The creation of ‘living’ things synthetically, of generative design, of patterns between order and chaos.
After reading this article I was surprised I hadn’t come across Barricelli before, given the influence of his work. A mathematician excited by the recent invention of the computer, evaluating his work visually rather than with equations, excited by the possibility of creating synthetic forms within a computer, without the intention to explain nature:
While admitting a connection back to Darwinian theory, he ultimately had no interest in merely simulating the realm of biology. his experiments were not models. rather, he wished to open up an autonomous field of life that was exclusively bionumeric. Barricelli’s numerical organisms were “alive” within a mathematical machine first and foremost. if they also revealed something about the bio- logical realm, so be it.
He drew up plans for DNA computers ten years after the discovery of the double helix:
his 1963 paper on “numerical testing of evolution theories” bears par- ticular historical significance. in it, Barricelli proposes a “chemo-analogical computer” using DNA molecules as the computational substrate—a mere ten years after the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick. According to Barricelli’s conjectures, such a computer would consist of a normal “hardware” computer connected to a “wet- ware” environment made up of DNA molecules. Barricelli constructed a “DNA-norm” to govern the cellular phe- nomena of the base-pair interactions. Computations would first be transferred from hardware to wetware; the DNA molecules would perform the computations; and the results would be fed back into the computer.
He used the computer to explore architectures for interactions that give rise to organisms- defining rules for the evolution of numbers from row to row, based on their local context. He looked at the printed output and changed the rules, trying to determine what caused patterns between total randomness and monotony, patterns that would give rise to things that appeared living.
