LEGO replicator

[Bill Morris]

Cool weirdness. Here's a video of a machine building a desired object, not one molecule at a time but one LEGO brick at a time according to a CAD fiile.

http://hackaday.com/2010/10/18/3d-printing-with-lego/?shared=email&msg=fail

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

That's a 3D printer. Clever but I'd be more impressed to see a mechanical self-replicator that would be able to made a copy of itself, and the copy make a copy of itself ad infinitum -- also known as life.

 

[Bill Morris]

Well, a 3D printer is a kind of replicator, but I wouldn't classify this thing as a 3D printer, since it doesn't print but rather builds stuff from the building blocks it was designed to use. No ink or plastic forming or selective laser sintering is involved. And whatever it makes can be recycled (disassembled, with the bricks resused to build something else). A LEGO turd becomes a LEGO chocolate bar or whatever.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

You might not choose to call it a 3D printer, but the article that you link does. A Lego chocolate bar is probably neither chocolate flavoured nor edible, and a Lego turd ... well let's not go there. It's an impressive piece of work, but it doesn't get us any closer to nanoassembly.

 

[Trekker4747]

"3D Printers" have been around for a long time.

 

[ThankQ]

That's a 3D printer. Clever but I'd be more impressed to see a mechanical self-replicator that would be able to made a copy of itself, and the copy make a copy of itself ad infinitum -- also known as life.

Actually, no. There's an awsome book by Michael Brooks called "13 Things That Don't Make Sense". One of those 13 things is Life. He goes on to explain how we can't yet even explain what life is:

"How would you define life? Is it whn a system reproduces itself? If that is the case, plenty of computer programs could be called alive, while plenty of people--sterile men and women, for example, or nuns--could not. Things that are alive consume fule, move around, and excrete waste products, but so do automobiles, and no one would call them alive."

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

True that.

 

[ThankQ]

True that.

I know, it's freaky. Until I read that chapter of the book, I never realized how hard it would be to define life!