Go Forth and Replicate; August 2001; Scientific American Magazine; by Moshe Sipper and James A. Reggia, sidebar by George Musser; 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 Rene 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 offspring."
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. Forty 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 [see "Self-Reproducing Machines," by Lionel Penrose; Scientific American, June 1959]. But self-replication has proved to be so difficult that most researchers study it with the conceptual tool that von Neumann developed: twodimensional cellular automata.