I put a version of the Find the Quine on github. You may help (and have fun) to find new chemlambda quines.
The page lets you generate random 10 nodes graphs (molecules), which are variants of a graph called “10_quine”. There are more than 9 billion different variants, therefore the space of all possibilities is vast.
Up to the moment 15 new quines candidates were found. You can see them in that page too.
New phenomena were discovered, to the point that now I believe that chemlambda quines are a dot in a sea of “who ordered this?”.
Who ordered this? Just look at “new quine? 3”. “10 nodes quine 5”. It displays an amazing range of outcomes. One of them is that it dies fast, but other appear rather frequently. The graph just blooms not into a living creature, more like into a whole ecology.
You can see several interesting pieces there.
There is a “growing blue tip” which keeps the graph alive.
There are “red spiders” who try to reach for the growing blue tip and eat it. But the red spiders sometimes return to the rest of the graph and rearrange it. They live and die.
There is a “blue wave” which helps the growing blue tip by fattening it.
There is a “bones structure” which appears while the red spiders try to eat the growing blue tip. It looks like the bones structure is dead, except that sometimes the red spiders travel back and modify the bones into new structures.
And there are also graphs which clearly are not quines, but they are extremely sensitive to the order of rewrites. See for example “!quine, sensitive 1”. There seems to be a boundary between the small realm of quines and the rest of the graphs. “new quine? 3” is on one side of that boundary and “!quine, sensitive 1” is on the other side.
So, play “Find the Quine” and mail me if you find something interesting!
On top of the page there is a link to my pages to play and learn. Mind that the versions of find the quine there and at github are slightly different, because I update them all the time and so they are not synchronized. I use github in order to have a copy just in case. In some places I can update the github pages, in other places I can update my homepage…