Structural Limits to Proto-Life Emergence: Evidence from Maximum-Entropy Reinforcement Learning
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study investigates whether failures of proto-life emergence are primarily due to limited optimization orto insufficient model expressivity. We formulate an abstract protocell-inspired environment as a continuouscontrolMarkov decision process and train a Soft Actor–Critic (SAC) agent under a maximum-entropyobjective to act as a strong exploration-preserving optimizer. The environment includes protein-like concentrationdynamics, membrane integrity, abstract functional role coverage, and division-like events, whileexpressivity is varied through three regimes controlling coupling strength, feedback structure, and internalmemory. Performance is evaluated using survival rate, success rate, mean functional role coverage, andmean number of division events. Across regimes, survival reached 100%, but success increased from 67.5%in the low-expressivity regime to 97.5% in the mid regime and 100% in the high regime. Mean division countrose from 7.58 and 9.05 in the low and mid regimes to 34.58 in the high regime, indicating a qualitativetransition toward growth-dominated behavior once stronger feedback and memory were available. Theseresults show that strong entropy-regularized optimization alone does not guarantee life-like organizationwhen essential state variables and interaction mechanisms are absent. Rather, the emergence of sustainedproto-biological behavior is bounded by the representational structure of the model itself. The findingsposition maximum-entropy reinforcement learning as a diagnostic tool for identifying missing structuralingredients in computational origin-of-life models.
Source: Informatica
Institutions: University of Technology Bahrain, University of Bahrain
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7196971240