Barry McMullin
Research Institute in Networks and
Communications Engineering (RINCE)
Dublin City University
Barry.McMullin@dcu.edu
ALife VII: August 2000
(FoilTeX
Presentation)
... This result is obviously substantial, but to express its real force we must formulate it in such a way that it cannot be trivialized ...
... Consider, for example, a two-state cellular system whose transition function takes a cell into state one when any of its neighbors is in state one. Define an automaton to be any area, even a single cell. A cell in state one then reproduces itself trivially in its neighboring cells...
... Clearly what is needed is a requirement that the self-reproducing automaton have some minimal complexity...
... This requirement can be formulated in a number of ways. We will do it by requiring that the self-reproducing automaton also be a [universal?] Turing machine.
...What the result does show is that the existence of a self-reproducing universal computer-constructor in itself is not relevant to the problem of biological and machine self-reproduction...
... Hence, there is a need for new mathematical conditions to insure non-trivial self-reproduction.
Computational criterion too strong rather than too weak?
... One of the difficulties in defining what one means by self-reproduction is that certain organizations, such as growing crystals, are self-reproductive by any naive definition of self-reproduction, yet nobody is willing to award them the distinction of being self-reproductive...
... A way around this difficulty is to say that self-reproduction includes the ability to undergo inheritable mutations as well as the ability to make another organism like the original...
...multidisciplinary proposals in Biotechnology/ICT will be welcomed.
This work is copyright ©2000 by Barry McMullin.
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Timestamp: 2000-08-16