My aim while studying Artificial Chemistries was to build a system that would evolve in a way similar, and not inferior to how Nature itself evolves. As such in a way only limited by the memory and the computation power of the medium used (i.e. the cpu where I would run the experiment).

You can find my work on Artificial Chemistries here.
Two videos (and several papers) really sum up my research:

1:

2: