Abstract. When four species compete stochastically in a cyclic way, the formation of two teams of mutually neutral partners is observed. In this paper we study through numerical simulations the extinction processes that can take place in this system both in the well mixed case as well as on different types of lattices. The different routes to extinction are revealed by the probability distribution of the domination time, i.e. the time needed for one team to fully occupy the system. If swapping is allowed between neutral partners, then the probability distribution is dominated by very long-lived states where a few very large domains persist, each domain being occupied by a mix of individuals from species that form one of the teams. Many aspects of the possible extinction scenarios are lost when only considering averaged quantities as for example the mean domination time.

Previously we reported [A. Wynveen et al., Phys. Rev. E 89, 022725 (2014)PLEEE81539-375510.1103/PhysRevE.89.022725] that requiring that the systems regarded as lifelike be out of chemical equilibrium in a model of abstracted polymers undergoing ligation and scission first introduced by Kauffman [S. A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993), Chap. 7] implied that lifelike systems were most probable when the reaction network was sparse. The model was entirely statistical and took no account of the bond energies or other energetic constraints. Here we report results of an extension of the model to include effects of a finite bonding energy in the model. We studied two conditions: (1) A food set is continuously replenished and the total polymer population is constrained but the system is otherwise isolated and (2) in addition to the constraints in (1) the system is in contact with a finite-temperature heat bath. In each case, detailed balance in the dynamics is guaranteed during the computations by continuous recomputation of a temperature [in case (1)] and of the chemical potential (in both cases) toward which the system is driven by the dynamics. In the isolated case, the probability of reaching a metastable nonequilibrium state in this model depends significantly on the composition of the food set, and the nonequilibrium states satisfying lifelike condition turn out to be at energies and particle numbers consistent with an equilibrium state at high negative temperature. As a function of the sparseness of the reaction network, the lifelike probability is nonmonotonic, as in our previous model, but the maximum probability occurs when the network is less sparse. In the case of contact with a thermal bath at a positive ambient temperature, we identify two types of metastable nonequilibrium states, termed locally and thermally alive, and locally dead and thermally alive, and evaluate their likelihood of appearance, finding maxima at an optimal temperature and an optimal degree of sparseness in the network. We use a Euclidean metric in the space of polymer populations to distinguish these states from one another and from fully equilibrated states. The metric can be used to characterize the degree and type of chemical equilibrium in observed systems, as we illustrate for the proteome of the ribosome.

Effects of spatial diffusion in a Kauffman-like model for prebiotic evolution previously studied in a "well-mixed" limit are reported. The previous model was parametrized by a parameter p defined as the probability that a possible reaction in a network of reactions characterizing the artificial chemistry actually appears in the chemical network. In the model reported here, we numerically study a grid of such well-mixed reactors on a two-dimensional spatial lattice in which the model chemical constituents can hop between neighboring reactors at a rate controlled by a second parameter η. We report the frequency of appearance of three distinct types of nonequilibrium steady states, characterized as "diffusively alive locally dead" (DALD), "diffusively dead locally alive" (DDLA) and "diffusively alive locally alive" (DALA). The types are defined according to whether they are chemically equilibrated at each site, diffusively equilibrated between sites, or neither, respectively. With our parametrization of the definitions of these nonequilibrium states, many of the DALA states are growing rapidly in population due to the explosive population growth of a few sites, while their entropy remains well below its equilibrium value. Sharp temporal transitions occur as exploding sites appear. DALD states occur less commonly than the other types and also usually harbor a few explosively growing sites but transitions are less sharp than in DALA systems.

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