Ok, I've done a little bit of surfing to see what people think about abiogenisis.
A common thread seems to be self replication using some form of free energy.
I jumped on the zerobot idea because that seems a much more purist way of running the evolution, not using other bots for gentic contamination or starting from a previously designed bot. DB was really designed as an evolution program, I think zerobots are a really good way of exploring what the program is capable of.
Testlund raises a good point, because the bots aren't limited, at the start, to only producing identical copies of themselves, the bots have taken it upon themselves to test the programming by varying their reproduction percentage. Also the idea that they might replicate in ways other than .repro is a possible reason to not give them the .repro command to start.
I think one of the problems that we are going to run into is that the veg are defined as veg outside the sim, not inside the sim. Eric thought of a neat way to provide the free energy that this sort of evolution needs to start but that might have an affect on the path evolution then takes. Otherwise we are using an outside, non evolving, heterotroph command to provide the start energy.
The virus thing is interesting, is this evolution of proper viruses or a form of evolutionary horizontal gene transfer as suggested by Carl Woese, the chap that discovered the Archaea?
instead of having the creature try to live on to the next generation, you have the genomes fighting just to survive till the next cycle. Genomes that can't are immediately removed, and fresh ones are given in their place. It's not natural selection, but it's definately not all random.
I don't see that as a problem tbh, you are looking at the evolution of a species in an area that provides the right properties for mutation, there are millions of other self replicating bodies in other areas, that aren't so encouraging for mutations and as your mutating bots die out more unmutated bots drift in. Until your mutating bots manage to colonise the area by evolving positive mutations this is always going to happen. I don't see evolution as a world wide blanket event. I think this is a great way of modeling natural selection, albeit our hotspot might be a little small...
Anyway, in the interest of not confusing things by arguing over terminology, I define a zerobot as starting from (almost) nothing and an evobot as being evolved from something with possible genetic contamination allowed.
Doesn't matter (to me) if the evolution is run as a test of randomness or in God mode. (You slaughtering the bots you don't like and pretending to take care of the bots you do like!)
The template I was thinking of is probably not a fixed template, more what you can't have. (You can have .repro, you can have as many random numbers as you like, but nothing else, for instance).