Coding cycles and population persistence in a self-interpreting artificial chemistry

Yomitsugi is a minimal artificial chemistry for investigating heredity when a description is copied faithfully but the machinery that interprets it is reconstructed in each generation. Reading a fixed description produces the next key–value reader, connecting three aspects of inheritance: available symbols, their interpretation, and continued reproduction. Under exact matching, complete readers can enter alternative coding cycles while preserving every symbol and maximal decoding information. Exhaustive enumeration through eight symbols identifies periods up to 192. Under noisy reading, an exact identity based on a matrix permanent shows that native and alternative complete codes have equal immediate probabilities of losing output values or complete key–value structure. Resource-sharing populations with three symbols maintain alternative cycles over the simulated observation period while occasionally reconstructing the native code. An exact binary reduction identifies conditions under which repertoire loss makes extinction unavoidable even without resource restriction. An occupation-time decomposition also shows that long serial lifetimes can consist largely of activity after repertoire loss. Matched interventions exchange existing values while preserving population size, resources, positional symbol inventories, and the first-sweep demographic law, yet alter subsequent reconstruction and persistence. Comparisons with exact unrestricted predictions show that resource restriction can substantially reduce continued population and repertoire presence even when native reconstruction is common. In the binary model, small output mutation restores communication between repertoire classes and produces a square-root splitting at their spectral crossing. Together, these results show how the inherited organization of interpretation shapes reproductive outcomes within a self-interpreting artificial chemistry.