I wrote a simulation that kinda behaved like this, without explicit code that actually started to behave like a lifeform about 8 years ago, here's a video <a href="https://youtu.be/OXceSiSEXIM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/OXceSiSEXIM</a>
The course "Origins of Life" (<a href="https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/95-origins-of-life" rel="nofollow">https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/95-origins-of-lif...</a>) covers this idea quite a bit. It's not a new idea, but so far of course, nobody has created new life this way. We're working on it.<p>The general premise is that cells began organizing when a lipid membrane was formed that was hydrophobic on the outside, and hydrophilic on the inside (like every drop of oil in water). Many current examples do demonstrate features that are reminiscent of life, and so the study is to improve on these materials, in the hopes that eventually we figure out what happened to make them "spark" to life.
I like this idea because it is a membrane-first type of scenario. I've always thought the idea of naked molecules replicating outside of an enclosed space to be unlikely. It is likely that membranes were there from the very beginning, and there was never a phase where you just have molecules replicating in the open ocean without a cell to enclose them.
Title bugs me because there’s a lot more ‘splainin to do, but discoveries like these do create little islands of plausibility that may connect in the future.
It's perhaps a well-known tidbit of computer history that Alan Turing devoted much effort to the study of Biology and the explanation of the 'algorithmic' nature of life i.e. how protein synthesis could extrapolate to the stripes of a zebra for example; this seems to be the induction step 0 that would bring it all together