FIXME: A Cell absorbs a Snippet and must identify if the Snippet is a poison or if it is food. Its fitness depends on making the accurate recognition.
FIXME: Multiple Localities: Compartments
FIXME: Nuclear compartment may be implemented differently.
FIXME: Simplify. In brief, the fundamental inspiration for Monod is the consideration of biological proteins as small computational units. In Monod, all computations are done within a simulated *cell* by a large number of small, functionally distinct proteins which *react* with each other and with *ligands* which form the input/output to the cell to modify said ligands and thus perform computation. The reactions are simple string manipulation operations. The processing units have basic capabilities such as recognizing, binding and releasing target sites (either on ligands or other processing units), logically integrating their inputs and acting based on the result, splitting and gluing ligands, locally modifying them, etc. They are in fact Turing-complete — redundantly so — but the Turing machine image should be modified by imagining *lots* of them binding and detaching from the tape, instead of just one.
One positive attribute of Monod is that it is computationally realistic to simulate on existing computers, as it uses standard tools and is thus able to capitalize on pre-existing and optimized infrastructure: ligands are strings and binding is done through regular expressions, for instance.
Another nice attribute of Monod is that it is particularly well-suited to computational evolutionary methods. This is because the evolutionary terminals - the *domains* which are the building blocks of the processing units - can be combined with great freedom, while providing enough flexibility to be Turing-complete.
A natural question to ask is whether the Monod approach is anything new, different from the other approaches mentioned earlier or others. Monod has been thought of and described in a context of biology, which is not quite so common in computer science; oftentimes, language differences can obscure otherwise evident similarities. FIXME: The answer is: I don't know...