The experiment casts insights into how biological life began on Earth.

Researchers at Google have observed the emergence of self-replicating artificial life forms, in an experiment that offers insights into how biological life began on our planet.

Their study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, involved a digital "primordial soup" with no rules or direction that simulated the outcome of leaving random data alone for millions of generations, resulting in the emergence of self-replicating digital life forms.

The findings could parallel the processes that led to the evolution of biological life.

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Life on Earth, according to the Googlers, likely began in a "primordial soup" too. Over billions of years and countless interactions, a mixture of water and organic compounds eventually gave rise to the first organisms. How chaos transformed into order remains a complex question but the researchers learned that – like biological life – artificial life struggles to conquer space (in a computer, of course).

"I don't think anything magic happened," study co-author Ben Laurie, a leading software engineer at Google, told New Scientist. "Physics occurred, and it just occurred a lot over a very long time, and it gave rise to some very complicated things." 

Laurie (pictured above) and his team's simulation represents a digital version of this primordial soup. No rules were imposed, and the random data were given no specific impetus. They used a minimalist programming language called Brainfuck, known for allowing only two mathematical operations: adding one or subtracting one.

The researchers modified the system so that the random data — stand-ins for molecules — could interact with each other, "left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions." Despite these austere conditions, self-replicating programs emerged.

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Laurie believes the findings suggest there are "inherent mechanisms" that enable life to form. However, experts caution that self-replication alone does not equate to life; we should also observe increasing complexity in the organisms.

The scientists noted that with more computing power — they were already pushing it with billions of steps per second on a laptop — more complex programs might emerge. With more powerful hardware, we could potentially see the formation of more lifelike entities.

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