A Brief Survey of Attempts to Build Artificial Self-Replicators

8 A Brief Survey of Attempts to Build Artificial Self-Replicators 

No successful attempt has been made so far to build a real autonomous artihcial SSR from scratch. W. M. Stevens summarizes the situation in the abstract of his PhD thesis  

Research into autonomous constructing systems capable of constructing duplicates of themselves has focused either on highly abstract logical models, such as cellular automata, or on physical systems that are deliberately simplihed so as to make the problem more tractable (Stevens, 

Stevens reviews some of the attempts made at building physical or abstract self-replicating machines  

NASA Advanced Automation for Space Missions 1980 Project. This study, titled A Self-Reproducing Interstellar Probe (REPRO), is one of the most realistic explorations of the design of an artificial macro self-rephcator and is briefly analyzed in its own section below (Freitas Jr., 1980). 

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