Actualy, you can get an infinite set with just 1 symbol in a language and two re-write production rules:
S->aS
S->a
so:
from a base case S:
S-->a
S-->aS-->aa
S-->aS-->aaS --> aaa
etc.
And what you're talking about properly is not a universe, nor anyting that is analogous to evolution. Something analogous to evolution would have the production rules altering as part of the process of generating the rules. IE, movement through a proper metaspace, not through a defined statespace. IE: the statespace of this grammar is infinite yet enitely determined by the operators
a, S-->aS>
If we had some sort of nondeterministic change in the operators... Suppose a rule that went something like this:
f(On)-->On+1 where O is an operation from the set defined by the function f.
so, in other words, our set of grammatical operators would go from:
a, S-->aS>
to
a, S-->aS, S-->bS>
Then you would, by changing the metspace state, end up with a new phase space. I don't think just adding strings to a closed language is analgous to evolution- you have to change the closure operations.
DL
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SDAI discovers formal generative grammar!
