And yet, self taught ML algorithms have mastered Chess.

Not trying to argue one way or another, but this kinda sounds like trying to reason about rock erosion caused by water by watching a mountain stream flow for 5 minutes.

We have a pretty detailed snapshot of life now, some fossils, and a general understand of biology.

I think you could actually get pretty far at understanding erosion if you had a pretty detailed snapshot of interesting river basins, some landmarks (this rock was over there, etc) and a general understanding of physics.

Now imagine that at every time step you also flip bits randomly on your own code.

That's what needs to be done to achieve what was achieved.

Are you coming at this from a creationist point of view? That's common rhetoric I heard when I was growing up. You'll need to jettison that entire way of thinking, it's built on faulty analogies like "the probability of shuffling a deck of cards into a certain arrangement is astronomically small, therefore evolution couldn't happen!" If you're actually interested in learning and not just sealioning, IMO this is a great resource:

https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/

There's a section specifically on abiogenesis: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CB0

To answer your initial question, it's really difficult to mentally grasp the scales involved with this. Billions of years, quadrillions of watts of power from the sun, some astronomically large number of chemical interactions happening simultaneously all over the early Earth. These numbers throw off one's naive sense of scale. The basic recipe of "hydrogen + time" will produce some very interesting results, however. Eventually we'll reach the heat death of the universe, or some other sort of end[1], but until then all the matter and energy bouncing around will get up to some cool stuff.

[1]: Good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

Are you equating any questioning of OoL dogma with creationism? That's not how science works, buddy.

Sigh, no. You're asserting that a lot in this thread, but that's not what's happening. In my comment above, I linked to a great learning resource that directly addresses the questions ezrion raised, and is good reading if you're actually curious. Separately, I addressed the likely context in which the question is getting asked, and pointed out that the worldview that starts with creationism is thought-terminating, and should be reassessed as a foundation.

It's great to question any existing consensus. But do so with the intent of learning, not trying to sneak in a religious worldview. If you're going to push a religious agenda, be courteous and at least be up front about it.

No, that's exactly what's happening. Ezrion is asking good questions. Dismissing those questions is not valid science. It's always valid in science to ask "but how do you know?" It is then necessary to accept a good explanation in good faith, though. However, OoL has gaping holes that are currently papered over with handwaving. It's not required to accept handwaving.

What are you talking about? Adding random noise to your random thing do not make it "more random". It remains the same.

A closer analogy would have been generating machine code directly.