Talk:Self-replicating machine

printable metal motors as well as structural parts
It occured to me that a metal that shifted between liquid n crystal forms at near human body temperature mold could build reusable laminate mechanical parts at mild temperatures. You just have some Ga liquid along with magnetic fibers, these make a kind of laminate felt at a magnetic field (the EM is kind of a combo of strand orienting with mold clamping) yet permits fluid flow or raster printing (possibly vector printing) absent an EM field

Ag or Au coated Co or supermagnet "filings" create the orientable strands when Amorphously blended with the Ga makes a squishy metal paste Oriented with an EM field they cease being squishy. This is then printed as a kind of 3d metal cardboard

As a result of the amalgam blend the metal laminate is firm at temps below 120F above that at warm water temperature they turn back into squishy metal liquid felt

One of the points of metal is that it can have structural surface channels that with a thick 2 mm electroplating would give stronger parts than many plastics, it also conducts electricity permitting printable motors.

I read that there is a goal to make reprap produce all of its own parts, This is kind of a universal shapeable goop that makes structural as well as electrical parts. Very awesome of course would be to print induction coils so that the printed parts could also power up from EM possibly from another reprap creation

Proposal: merge Clanking replicator to here
The proposal is to merge the article Clanking replicator into this article. The term "clanking replicator" is nothing but a cute moniker for what is described here, and I see no good reason to maintain two articles on the same subject. --Lambiam 14:59, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Support merge. I'm not seeing a substantial independent concept for the the Clanking term, and little of that article seems different than the concept here in the generic phrase. DMacks (talk) 15:10, 15 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Support merge. *Agreement sounds* Christopher Overbeck (talk) 00:10, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Support merge. But somebody has to be willing to do the work, right?  &#8212;jmcgnh  (talk) (contribs)  02:45, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Support merge. Seems like a good idea to me; they cover the same material. "Clanking replicator" is basically a quip on the part of Eric Drexler, no need to have a separate article. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 20:58, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Agreed and ✅; much of it was a long-standing content fork too. Klbrain (talk) 14:52, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

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I have deleted the reference to a patent that was a "replicating workstation" (which is not a complete action replicator at all).

Article not NPOV, should acknowlege skepticism
The article briefly notes that no self replicating machine has yet been produced (buried in the middle of a paragraph) but lists only reports of advances and successes (supposed) with no room given to skeptics.

I'm no expert but I am going to add a Skepticism section, though I hope someone more qualified will do so. (I'm a career software engineer with a Masters in Computer Science, but never worked in AI or robotics).

I acknowledge an internet search finds far more positive than negative articles. But there are some negative articles nowhere reflected in this article. Therefor it is NOT written with a Neutral Point of View.

This could be like the situation in artificial intelligence 10 years ago (in 2012), when self-driving cars where confidently predicted by now (2022) by Google, Uber, Toyota, Tesla etc., who actually spent billions of dollars on research, and put hundreds of vehicles on the road.

Now it is widely admitted that we are decades away from self-driving cars if they ever happen. (References: just Google "self driving cars". You don't even have to Google "self driving cars fail").

For example, about the cell-clump replication by Josh Bongard and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, Ars Technica says


 * Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/mobile-clusters-of-cells-can-help-assemble-a-mini-version-of-themselves/


 * Scientists on Monday announced that they'd optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be mobile themselves. The researchers call this process "kinematic self-replication," although that's not entirely right—the copies need help from humans to start moving on their own, are smaller than the originals, and the copying process grinds to a halt after just a couple of cycles.


 * So, of course, CNN headlined its coverage "World's first living robots can now reproduce."
 * This is a case when something genuinely interesting is going on, but both the scientists and some of the coverage of the developments are promoting it as far more than it actually is. So, let's take a look at what has really been done.

This shows not only that this project accomplished much less than it claimed, but the media accepted the claims and exaggerated them.

I want to point out that a purely chemical inorganic salt crystal in salt solution grows. Each Na cnd CL atom attracts others and the crystal grows. Are they a massive array of self replicating machines? If your machine does no more than a salt crystal you haven't accomplished much, in my view. (But I don't have a secondary source for that).

Further, every living cell has the ability to reproduce itself. So any project that starts with living cells is not inventing self-replication, it is assuming it is available.

A Google search for "self replicating robot (hype | exaggeration)" will find some more articles.

Ttulinsky (talk) 22:10, 11 October 2022 (UTC)