This is my second post filling in the details of a Star Trek vision. In Star Trek replicators make everything from parts for spaceships to food for human consumption. One would assume that a replicator can also make the parts necessary for more replicators, thus replicating itself. As such it is an artistic vision of what von Neumann famously conceived as the universal constructor, a machine that can replicate itself and through the process of mutation grow to arbitrary complexity. While the ...

This is my second post filling in the details of a Star Trek vision. In Star Trek replicators make everything from parts for spaceships to food for human consumption. One would assume that a replicator can also make the parts necessary for more replicators, thus replicating itself. As such it is an artistic vision of what von Neumann famously conceived as the universal constructor, a machine that can replicate itself and through the process of mutation grow to arbitrary complexity. While the ...