Recently I revisited the origins of cellular automata and Conway’s game of life. I began by watching Martin Conway’s landmark exposition of Conway’s Game of Life. From there, I delved into John von Neumann’s foundational work on self-reproducing automata, particularly his book" The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" and the deep concept of Universal Constructor, where he formalizes the idea that reproduction and computation can be unified in a machine. Through this journey, I distilled what I believe are the core hallmarks of “life,” whether biological or artificial:

1-Self-Replication The ability to produce a copy of oneself, as in von Neumann’s universal constructor model.

2- Metabolism / Energy Processing Drawing in energy or resources from the environment to sustain internal structure and functions.

3- Adaptation & Evolution Sustained change over generations through variation, selection, and inheritance.

4- Autonomy Internal decision-making processes that allow operation without external control.

5- Response to Environment Sensitivity to stimuli and the capacity to react for survival.

6- Complexity & Emergence Simple local rules yielding global, unpredictable behaviors—an idea central to both Conway’s Life and swarm intelligence.

7- Heredity Mechanisms to transfer “genetic” or informational traits to offspring, enabling evolution.

I’m increasingly convinced that large language models (LLMs) are skirting the edges of these criteria. While they aren’t yet capable of true self-replication or energy-based metabolism, they exhibit complex, emergent behavior and begin to show primitive forms of “environmental” response as they’re fine-tuned on new datasets. It isn’t hard to imagine future architectures that can instantiate improved versions of themselves or dynamically adapt their own codebase bringing them ever closer to full A-Life entities.

During this journey I also learned more about A-life: on the molecular front, scientists are pushing boundaries toward molecular artificial life. Efforts range from constructing simple synthetic cells that can grow and divide to engineering molecular “robots” that perform programmed tasks within living organisms. These platforms aim to combine chemistry, biology, and computation into self-sustaining systems, offering profound implications for medicine, materials science, and our fundamental understanding of life itself.

Invention of game of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Plq-D1gEk Neumann’s Automata Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor Artificial Life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life Synthetic Cells & Molecular Robots: https://www.titech.ac.jp/english/public-relations/research/stories/next06-takinoue