The news comes from a recently published paper titled "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction." The raw material for the experiments is tens of thousands of pieces of code, written in a programming language called—I'm not making this up—Brainfuck. The researchers call this an "esoteric language chosen for its simplicity" in only allowing two mathematical functions: +1 or -1. These chunks of code were randomly mixed, combined, and "left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions" over millions of generations.