Go Forth and Replicate; Your Future with Robots; Special Editions; by Moshe Sipper and James A. Reggia; 10 Page(s)

"Apples beget apples, but can machines beget machines? Today it takes an elaborate manufacturing apparatus to build even a simple machine. Could we endow an artificial device with the ability to multiply on its own? Self-replication has long been considered one of the fundamental properties separating the living from the nonliving. Historically our limited understanding of how biological reproduction works has given it an aura of mystery and made it seem unlikely that it would ever be done by a man-made object. It is reported that when René Descartes averred to Queen Christina of Sweden that animals were just another form of mechanical automata, Her Majesty pointed to a clock and said, See to it that it produces off_spring.

"The problem of machine self-replication moved from philosophy into the realm of science and engineering in the late 1940s with the work of eminent mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. Some researchers have actually constructed physical replicators. Almost 50 years ago, for example, geneticist Lionel Penrose and his son, Roger (the famous physicist), built small assemblies of plywood that exhibited a simple form of self-replication. But self-replication has proved to be so difficult that most researchers study it with the conceptual tool that von Neumann developed: two-dimensional cellular automata.