Von Neumann's machine in the shell: enhancing the robustness of self-replication processes

• Authors: Hiroki Sayama
• Venue: ICAL 2003 Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Artificial life
• Year: 2002

One of the grand challenges in artificial life is to create an artificial system that demonstrates self-replication and evolution in the real physical world (Bedau et al. 2000). This question was obviously initiated by von Neumann's seminal work on the self-replicating and evolving automaton that was presented more than five decades ago (von Neumann 1951; 1966). Unlike his well known idea of universal computer, however, von Neumann's universal constructor has never been subject to physical implementation (Friedman 1996). This is mainly due to the fragility of its mechanisms against perturbations that are unavoidable in more realistic kinematic settings. In this brief concept paper, I present a simple, but substantial, I believe, idea of enhancing the robustness of the self-replication processes, by introducing an additional subsystem that constructs a "workplace" prior to automaton construction. Workplaces are assumed to be solid structures that can be easily assembled under perturbations and can rigidly hold other components during the automaton construction processes. Similar kind of strategies are found to be prevalent in biological organisms, suggesting the effectiveness of the presented idea for the realization of kinematic models of self-replication and evolution.