Evolution of Emergent Behavior in Cellular Systems

This master's thesis deals with the topic of cellular automata and their utilization in the research of self-replication, especially with the focus on self-replicating loops. It also shows several possible approaches how to optimize the replication process. The first part is focused on theoretical aspects of cellular automata. It acquaints the readers with the questions of self-replication in the cellular automata and present some of the existing self-replicating loops, starting with the widely known Langton's loop. The second part presents the optimization of the replication process considering two selected variants of self-repricating loops - Byl's loop and Chou-Reggia loop. Two approaches are introduced together with their possible combination. The first approach is based on multiple self-replication. The second one is based on the reduction of the number of steps of the cellular automaton needed to create a copy of the loop