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Self-Replicating Robots
ABC News is running a story that self-replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Scientists at Cornell University have created small robots that can build copies of themselves. Here is a movie demonstrating the self-replication process. And the paper that will be published in Thursdays issue of Nature.
Quick, someone alert the SPCA!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
/. stories have been performing this feat for years...
(the trick is to get them to *stop* duplicating...)
Would this be considered robot porn?
Don't Tread on Me
That's a really cool robot and all, but it's not replicating itself. It's just taking more pieces, already machined, of itself to break itself in two.
Hell they might as well consider the raw material to be "robots that are powered off", and then have the bots push the power button on the "raw material" to create a new robot.
Lame.
Old Glory Insurance
SNL Skit, funny as shit!
I can't wait till my neighbor's lawn mower and mine (both Friendly Robotics) can mate, the people across the street can never seem to keep their lawn mowed and are too cheap to buy one like ours... Hell I'll pimp mine out if it increases property values in my neighborhood.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I am not Sarah Connor, and I don't know anyone destined to stop these evil self-replicating robots, terminators, or Skynet. Just wanted to make that clear.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
So they can assemble spare parts into copies of themselves. Where do they get the spare parts? Oh right.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
If only webservers could replicate themselves whenever they detect the /. effect.
Coralized Movie
"Please have your pets, er, I mean robots spayed or neutered".
In March 2005, we discovered engineers at the University of Bath working on a machine that can rapid prototype and replicate itself.
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.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who runs a one-semester smash-hit class called "How to Make Almost Anything", is determined to produce affordable, replicating personal fabricators by 2025.
And today Hod Lipson has announced the arrival of simple self replicating robots with enormous potential.
Applications
More complex shapes are possible in principle, such as adding grippers, cameras, new sensors etc. to modules. A robot could assemble itself into a new structure to deal with novel events. Also points a way to self-repairing robots.
Nanomachines: Lipson is interested in making these machines at microscale. That could drive major advances in Nanotechnology because huge numbers of robots are needed to manufacture things at a molecular scale. Self-replication is how biology does it.
Implications
Could change the way almost everything is manufactured. Machines that clone themselves are a key factor in the near horizon revolution of digital fabrication.
The movie (accelerated 4X) is eerie to watch. It's easy to imagine a clutter of cubes picking themselves up and walking towards you.
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
How is this any more impressive than what Edward F. Moore did in 1959? There was a Scientific American article about it, and I saw him demonstrate it at a lecture in the late sixties.
Basically he had a two-dimension row of pieces, rather like jigsaw puzzle pieces, held upright between two pieces of plexiglass. The pieces had just the right shape; they were basically diamonds with a truncated bottom (so they sat in one particular orientation) and sides. Initially they'd all be sitting flat. He would "add heat" by shaking the contraption laterally. Nothing would happen, because the blunt ends would hit against each other.
Then he'd take two of them and tilt them and slide them together, producing a single two-celled "organism." There were little hook-like projections that held them together.
He would shake the thing again. This time, because the two "cells" were tilted, their ends would scoop up underneath the blunt ends of the neighboring "cells," tilting them up into the proper position to hook together too.
So, when he shook the thing in its initial state, nothing would happen. But when locked two of them together into a "creature" and shook them, they caused the other "cells" to assemble into two-celled organisms just like the original one.
In other words, the organism had created copies of itself.
It really worked; there was no deception; after the lecture practically everyone swarmed around and played with the thing and it didn't require any sleight-of-hand twists of the wrist.
I thought it was a strained tour-de-force then, and I think these "self-replicating robots" are just a fancier example of the same thing.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Freeman Dyson had the great example of self-replicating robots in his book 'Disturbing the Universe.'
Imagine sending a quarter-pound payload of a well-programed robot of such construction to something like one of Jupiter's icy moons. It is as small as needed to do the following tasks: replicating twice, grab a small piece of the ice on the moon as cargo, and then launching itself with some element in the ice as fuel towards mars. That's all it is programmed to do.
In x amount of time you have a mars with oceans. Astroid mining could also work on similar principles.
Regardless of how plausible or crazy the above ideas are, the concept is gorgeous for people... The investment in one such machine can yield payoffs of millions/billions of man-hours of labor, in places man can exist etc.
There is always the observation of slavery/exploitation if such a machine can replicate. Or even fears of Matrix/virus-like behavior which continues uncontrollably. But it is an interesting idea to think about. Rarely can a human investment of time provide such a staggering turnaround in product.
Interesting concept, even if it does still resemble science-fiction.
But it does mean that self-replicating robots are, unsurprisingly, possible, and that if the robots could be made simpler, they could perhaps replicate using simpler pieces, and so forth.
More importantly, if you gave the robots a whole bunch of pieces (basically, the equivalent of Lego blocks) they could perhaps replicate and reproduce into shapes that best suit their environment - they're modular and expandable, which might have important applications (e.g., rescue, exploration, etc).
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Well, if they make one that looks like Amanda Tapping, sign me up. I don't even care if it's evil!
The thing is, self replication isn't a completely clearcut situation. Everything has inputs, so the issue is how distant from your inputs you can get. In an extreme example, I could say that a rock with a broken stick attached to it is a self replicator, because if you put the stick of a pair of rocks connected by a stick under it, the rock will break the connecting stick and have created two more copies of itself.
For a more real-world example, look at malformed prions involved in BSE (mad cow disease). In a way, they self replicate - a single malformed prion can end up leaving your brain full of them. On the other hand, their input is simply a normal prion - they just fold it into their misformed shape. Is that really replication? Yes, but it's a pretty simple form of replication with very limited inputs.
A real feat would be robots that could self replicate with their only material inputs being, say, raw minerals and energy. That would be closer to what bacteria do.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
...to synthesize the required parts in just the right place out of midair. I'm sure this technology could have uses beyond self-reproducing robots though I haven't thought of one yet.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
"Machines making machines... how perverse!" - See Threepio
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
...because some inconsiderate dumbass posted a direct link to a 12 MB movie on the front page of slashdot.
I foresee my karma going down the shitter.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
There is a simple criterion that separates trivial self-replication (as in crystals that grow and break, then grow again, etc.) from interesting self-replication (as in living beings). This criterion was introduced by Von Neumann more than 50 years ago. An interesting self-replicating system is one that has the possibility to evolve, and to reach arbitrary levels of complexity.
See Barry McMullin's paper or Tim Taylor's thesis.
The simple way to do that is to have a "plan" (the genome) that can be read by a "constructor" (the rest of the machine) which follows the plan for building a copy of itself, including the plan. Modifications in the plan lead to modifications in the result. That sounds obvious to us, but Von Neumann wrote about those things more than a decade before the structure of DNA was elucidated.
It also means that the constructor must be, or contain, a Turing machine - a universal computer, making it able to construct anything that can be mechanically constructed out of a program. In living beings, the Turing machine is the result of the complex interactions between proteins that regulate each other's transcriptions and activity. Again, this is obvious to us, but only because Monod and Jacob discovered it in the 70s.
That's why Von Neumann had to invent a very complex structure in a very complex cellular automaton to obtain a really "self-replicating" system (in the interesting sense). That's also why Chris Langton's self-replicating loops are not really "interestingly" self-replicating. And that's why the structures in TFA are even less interestingly self-replicating. Hell, they have to rely on ready-made modules ! They are not even on the same level as simple self-replicating patterns in the Game of Life, wince in the Game of Life new "modules" are constantly created.
The defining factor of life is not self-replication on the global scale. It is the fact that this self-replication occurs by constant self-building. Living systems can build themselves, not out of ready-made modules (babies aren't built by patching together bits of arms, legs, brains, etc) but by breaking down external materials, extracting energy from their environment, then using it to build themselves, in apparent complete contempt the 2nd law of thermodynamics (the key word here is apparent - every single reaction in living beings is completely compatible with the laws of physics, otherwise it wouldn't take place - duh!). Even though the resulting compounds are thermodynamically very unfavorable, they persist because they are constantly replenished by the set of chemical reactions known as "life", which can essentially be defined as autocatalysis resulting in structures with a capacity for evolution.
Hod Lipson is a really great researcher. His work on developmental systems for evolutionary design of structure is so cool it hurts. But I think he and his guys might want to tone down the comparisons with biological self-replication. Right now the structures they have are not even on the same level as the simple patterns that you can see in the Game of Life !