Is there a code which can manifest a sort of life?

Answer 1

Electric sheep [crowdsourced evolving art]. A 'genetic algorithm' generates screensavers. Popular (upvoted) 'electric sheep' get to pass on their genes to new screensavers worldwide. You can also design your own and see how they do.

https://electricsheep.org/sheep#sheep

* edited for +detail

Answer 2

I think you're referring to a concept in A.I. computer science called the 'singularity'. There's no single program/code that can create such a thing (currently). If it were a possibility, it would likely contain programs with a purpose that work alongside other programs. These programs would work together for a larger purpose. Learning, communication, etc would have to have their own areas overall and work together in order to perform high order critical thinking tasks.

Right now we can easily let a machine learn by allowing it to remember and find patterns in previous, current, and possible future situations. But this doesn't make it think as we do. This is such a complex and long topic that it couldn't possibly fit in this post, and even then ... a lot of it still being researched and debated.

There are a few problems in creating AGI's and General A.I's. One of which is the OFF switch problem for example. You cannot just put an off switch on a robot for example without consequences. For example, suppose your robot was ordered to make you some tea, and it would proceed to do this. But suppose there was something in its way like a child on the floor. So you would proceed to hit the switch, but the robot would stop you because you are hindering its task. Computers see tasks and completing them as rewards (1) and not completing them as (0).

Suppose then you make the robot aware of the switch and have the same reward value as completing the making the tea task? What would happen is as soon as you turn it on, it would hit the OFF switch right away. Because according to that robot, the reward is the same and quicker to achieve.

This goes on and on with more problems/paradox's. This is the issues we're having right now. Of course if we can't get past this simple behavior, we cannot effectively create complex ones.

This is just an example of how far off we really are in terms of AGI or General AI, never mind "life" itself - or however you wish to define that.

sorry for a long wall of text x.x

Answer 3

A random walker represents a sort of life. You can add more walkers and define their behavior when they interact to add complexity to this sort of life.
"Sort of life" is a very generic term so the answer to your question is yes. If you get more specific it could be "depends" or "no".