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Towards Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers
Neil Halelamien writes "Researchers at the University of Bath are developing a rapid prototyping machine capable of making copies of itself and other products, reminiscent of the Universal Constructor proposed by von Neumann. The so-called Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (or RepRap) would produce items from raw materials and small components like microchips. If successful, this could make rapid prototyping cheap enough for regular in-home usage, especially since the project's lead, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, will be releasing his project's designs under the GNU GPL. It's previously been proposed that a similar system would be useful for space exploration and industrialization."
Oh darn... the editors cut out my link to the Wikipedia article on von Neumann's Universal Constructor (i.e. clanking replicator). Here it is:
...
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Constructor
From the article:
A clanking replicator is an artificial self-replicating system that relies on conventional large-scale technology and automation. The term evolved to distinguish such systems from the microscopic "assemblers" that nanotechnology may make possible.
Such a machine violates no physical laws, and we already possess the basic technologies necessary for some of the more detailed proposed designs.
A self-replicating machine would need to have the capacity to gather energy and raw materials, process the raw materials into finished components, and then assemble them into a copy of itself. It is unlikely that this would all be contained within a single monolithic structure, but would rather be a group of cooperating machines or an automated factory that is capable of manufacturing all of the machines that make it up. The factory could produce mining robots to collect raw materials, construction robots to put new machines together, and repair robots to maintain itself against wear and tear, all without human intervention or direction. The advantage of such a system lies in its ability to expand its own capacity rapidly and without additional human effort; in essence, the initial investment required to construct the first clanking replicator would have an arbitrarily large payoff with no additional cost.
On a completely different note, does anyone else remember the Slylandro probes from Star Control 2?
It's slashcode. If you just want to type text, you can turn off the HTML formatting.
Newlines aren't considered significant in HTML, except for <pre> elements and maybe <code> or <ecode>
I typed this message using the extrans (html tags to text) and keyed in newlines where you see them.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I'm not sure what the big deal is about this particular rapid prototyping machine at Bath. Hod Lipson's lab at Cornell, for instance, has been able to create a solid freeform fabrication system which can print plastic, metal, circuits, actuators, and even batteries! They are, in my opinion, much further along than the referenced article. Other related projects of include Chrikjian's work at Johns Hopkins, and Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab at Brandeis University.
Tin is not toxic.
MSDS here.
Those other three, you probably don't want to be stuffing the turkey with, though.
I worked for five years for a company that made rapid prototyping milling machines for circuit boards.
The circuit board rapid prototyping machine was basically an X-Y plotter with a Dremell tool motor that moved up and down. It cut lines on the surface of a copper-coated fiberglass board.
The cheapest machine to do this still cost about $10,000. Plus you had to have the PCB all ready laid out and ready for manufacture. It was slow, loud, and difficult to calibrate. I did a rewrite of the manual in English in order to clarify lots of little details needed for efficient operation. My rewrite came to 40 pages. And this is just to make a simple circuit like an op-amp buffer.
The machine 'ate' milling tools like gumdrops, at about $17 each. One tiny mistake, and your board was toast. Our fearless leader couldn't grasp that our primary competition wasn't the other circuit board milling machine maker, it was SPICE and the offshore inexpensive board houses where you could e-mail your Gerber files and get back finished professional PCBs by FedEx letter within a few days at much less cost than the materials alone would cost for the milling machine.
A great idea and product turned into a dead-end job, a white-elephant product, and a brick wall of cement-head management.
The point is, any 'rapid prototyping' machine will have a long way to go before it does anything relevant and productive. It will be many decades before any machine attempting to claim to be a 'general-purpose' rapid-prototyping machine will be anything more than a very expensive laboratory curiosity; the subject of speculative psuedo-scientific articles just this side of the science-fiction line.
Yeah I read about this in The Science of Discworld which is a really great read overall. I remembered enough for google to provide the rest. Here is a link to the homepage of the guy who ran the experimenta nth/ade.html
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adri
Cheers.
Slashcode has been behaving interestingly for a few years now.
Using only Plain Old Text you can insert any of the allowed
HTML tags.
me
- to show
you.If you will.
Note
how
these last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.
This kind of renders HTML format obsolete, code format redundant, and extrans just a variant of code. And all of those options are functionally available under the increasingly misnamed "Plain Old Text." Of course this was a big improvement over the old method, and is an improvement that should stay. But the option menu should go, as many people get stuck in HTML mode and don't know how to get out, and other don't realize that you can use the allowed HTML tags in plain old text mode.Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
The ______ Agenda
11 billion years? Terrestrial life has only had 4.3 billion years at most, unless there's a species of bacteria that likes living in magma.
Evolution isn't, in itself, a random process. It incorporates randomness, but it also incorporates natural selection, which is like anti-randomness, in the same way that the random walk of an ant is mediated my the feedback from its sensory apparatus. You're right that it's not terribly efficient, but it's running on the ultimate massively-parrallel simulation hardware (the universe), so it gets there in the end.
Evolutionary approaches to technological advancement are likely to incorporate human insight, thus enormously speeding up the process and elimanating odd situations akin to the vertebrate eye, which is inverted (the blood vessels and nerves are in front of the photoreceptors) due to the historical path that vertebrate evolution took.
Of course, there is a tendency for evolutionary design processes to produce designs that are largely incomprehensible to humans (at least without a great deal of effort and reverse engineering), so human insight may be limited to gently guiding the design by carefully tweaking the undelying selection pressures, thus making the design of a new computer chip more akin to growing bonsai than any development process that we're familiar with.
But over the past few years we've seen a growing number of university teams approaching cheap personal prototyping from different angles. Each quietly adding to the pool of ideas from which the next efforts will draw.
Wired Magazine, in November 2004 covered Neil Gershenfeld's work at MIT. Slashdot discussion here
Gershenfeld's can produce solid objects like eyeglass frames, action figures and electronic devices like radios and computers.
Another approach to rapid prototyping and manufacturing uses inkjet technology. Inkjet Printers spitting out polymer instead of ink, manufacturing solar cells, batteries, complete working gadgets, human tissue and computer circuitry. (Disclosure: The above link is one of my BlogSpot articles on the acceleration).
Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
or
Google Search
The software simulates a variety of rudimentary virtual robots. In an accelerated Darwinian contest of survival over hundreds of generations, the most successful robotic designs are then physically prototyped. Robots autonomously designing, testing and manufacturing robots.
We're very close.
Ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
>All of which are toxic
Bismuth is in Pepto-Bismol and tin in in some toothpastes (look for "stannous fluoride"), though I think it's no longer in "tin cans".
Back on topic, isn't the right way to do this to build an ecosystem of specialized assemblers? Adam Smith's famous pin factory showed the advantage of division of labor for an industrial process. In nature, we don't have any single life form that fixes nitrogen, photosythesizes, and aerates soil.
It looks like they're on track for a build-most-things machine that depends on inputs of a specialty chemical (photo-setting polymer) and containing a laser that it can't build itself. Still useful, but a long way from the theoretical Von Neumann machine.
The human body is far, far, far from perfection. We've gone through some pretty radical changes in the last 5 million years, had our genetic diversity stripped to the bone by near-extinction genetic bottlenecks during glaciations and are generally a rather inbred bunch that survive only through a collection of ad-hock genetic hacks.
P ages/S/Sexual_Reproduction.html
Case in point - as a result of the reconfigurations necessary to facilitate bipedalism, the vans deferens tube that links the testes to the urethra in human males is looped around the ureter. I doubt that this is in any way a 'perfect' configuration.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Biology
Our immune system has suffered from being a relatively low priority while we've been undergoing the various changes of the past 5 million years. Emu's, which have remained in much the same form (compared with humans) since they first grew feathers and lost their teeth 65+ million years ago, have been able to focus their evolution on developing their immune systems, and now have one of the most advanced immune systems of any terrestrial creature. Sharks have followed a similar path of changing little and reaching a certain plateau of perfection within their niche.
Perhaps in a few gigayears, when humans have, hopefully, collonised the stars and lived in a stable (if diverse on a local scale) environment, we'll see some approximation of perfection in the decendents of homo sapiens. I doubt it'll be a single brand of perfection though, but rather a perfection born of diversity, of organisms adapted to whatever challenges they come to face, from generalists to ultra-specialists. When adaptations approach fundamental limits of physics, it may be appropriate to call it perfection. Right now, we're less 'perfect' than cockroaches.