Fifty years of research on self-replication: an overview
Artificial Life - Special issue on self-replication
Algorithm 447: efficient algorithms for graph manipulation
Communications of the ACM
Graph Algorithms
The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms
The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms
Introduction to Algorithms
Modular Reconfigurable Robots in Space Applications
Autonomous Robots
Distributed reconfiguration of metamorphic robot chains
Distributed Computing
Computer
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Selective evolutionary generation systems: theory and applications
Selective evolutionary generation systems: theory and applications
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This article is motivated by the need to minimize the number of elements required to establish a self-reproducing system. One such system is a self-reproducing extraterrestrial robotic colony, which reduces the launch payload mass for space exploration compared to current mission configurations. In this work, self-reproduction is achieved by the actions of a robot on available resources. An important consideration for the establishment of any self-reproducing system is the identification of a seed, for instance, a set of resources and a set of robots that utilize them to produce all of the robots in the colony. This article outlines a novel algorithm to determine an optimal seed for self-reproducing systems, with application to a self-reproducing extraterrestrial robotic colony. Optimality is understood as the minimization of a cost function of the resources and, in this article, the robots. Since artificial self-reproduction is currently an open problem, the algorithm is illustrated with a simple robotic self-replicating system from the literature and with a more complicated self-reproducing example from nature.