Any guesses when this will happen? Life springing up in a 2D-Automata or something like that? What size will it be? How many cells does the smallest self reproducing 2D-Automata need?
"The evolution of self-replicating computer organisms" (1996) http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se...
4096x4096 grid. 16 opcodes. Randomly seed the field. Observe string replicators at surprisingly high frequency. Much simpler than y'all think.
But that is just because they gave them all the necessaray tools to do so. So the program only has to 1) Set pointer A to its beginning 2) Set pointer B to somewhere 3) Copy from pointer A to pointer B 4) Increase pointer A 5) Increase pointer B. 6) GOTO 1
If you look at the actual instruction set they use, it's even worse. They served the opcodes needed for replication on a silver plate.
That does not count. You could just as well give the programs an opcode that says "copyMyself" and say that creating life is easy because many programs used that opcode.
So the above doesn't count, okay, make it a bit stricter and it takes a few orders of magnitude more computation to generate self replication. A bit stricter again, another few orders of magnitude. Then we run out of computing power, but can conjecture that by the time you get to the physics of our universe, self replication will presumably still appear at least once in, say, every 1e1000 Hubble volumes. Which is still silver plate territory compared to e.g. Conway's game of life, which has no uphill paths. So you get to pick what level you're satisfied with.
Also, I think most people would expect that "organisms" (as opposed to the more usual A-Life term "agents") are capable of homeostasis—that random bit-flips of their internal structure, or even another replicator attempting to "eat" into them, won't break their replicating ability. That's one of the (more implicit, oft-left-unstated) bars by which we usually measure whether something is alive. (E.g. it's the one that allows us to separate viruses from dormant bacteria.)
http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&start=0
But in HighLife there is a trivial replicator:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(cellular_automat...
Of course for life you need not just replication but mutation and antifraility