Quantum Mechanics and Self-Replicating Machines

Thank you, Larry. Since the other replies have been long winded, and yours the most enthusiastic, I though I'd take the time to acknowledge it here.

The reason for the pairs is, of course, in the abscence of computers, CAD files, CAD systems, NC machines, and probably even writing paper, self-reproduction of a shop full of machine tools is possible only when there is two of everything. And your post indicates you understand this.

For those that do not, in the absence of a drawing or schedule, one might be busy repairing things all day, but if more operators became available, it would probably be most effective to work directly from each machine tool as if it were broken.

That is, disassemble, extract one part, reassemble to be sure that nothing was lost, then focus just on the one part, with calipers if need be, and duplicate it.

A whole machine shop might have a lathe, mill, surface grinder, and cylindrical grinder, all powered by some BIG theoretical power supply that I am not including in my quantum mechanical scribblings. Assume unlimited power, limited resources, limited time, and limited labor, but a steadily growing demand as things wear out and new Mars colonists arrive.

So you pull the spindle out of the mill, put everything else back on it, hang an Out of Order sign on it, UNPLUG IT AND LOCK IT OUT, and measure the spindle with calipers. You pull some stock, or, having unlimited power, melt some rock, refine some metal, pour a slug, and rough it out on the lathe, file or finish turn, and head for the cylindrical grinder.

You grind it close, maybe using a long-since-worn out micrometer with no graduations as a direct mesurement device, and you get it close enough. Then you notice a problem.

It's of hardened steel, now, since you hardened it in between the lathe and the cylindrical grinder. But you forgot to slot it! It's going to spin if you put if back in the mill, so you put a narrow wheel on the grinder, a wheel that happens to be made from Martian rock held together with synthesized hydrocarbons, and, grossly overloading the tool, you grind a suitable slot, and you are ready to disassemble.

Now, if you were an experienced machinst, and I am not saying I am, you'd have thought BEFORE roughing the slug, finishing it, and hardening it, that you could have slotted it efficiently on the mill.

But wait a second, the mill is OOO. So you have to have a second mill.

Now one of the first finite algorithms we have to apply to self-reproduction is sort of a combination of old wisdom and something extremely specific. We "do the hard part first", which is the old wisdom, and specifically, we take the slug, center drill it, and then, on centers, on the mill, machine the slot first, before even turning it.

Why? Because, by the old wisdom, if there's something that needs doing in parts, and you do the hard part as soon as possible, not necessarily first, you've got a little working room and you can avoid mistakes like hardening the spindle, then grinding the slot.

Now this is easy to incorporate into a computer program, but to a person, it is wisdom that cannot be taught unless they learn all about finite math and the critical path method. (Gantt charts. Hate 'em) But an appropriate, sufficiently deep theoretical understanding is the equivalent of wisdom, and usually costs as much in tuition and labor as you'd earn learning it. And this theoretical understanding can be taught without knowing anything about finite problems or applications. Just a few simple things to learn, and you're ready to fly to Mars, and if one of your fellow colonists has to take over when you drop that spindle on your foot, no problem. Everyone is multi-trained without seventeen lifetimes of apprenticeships.

How's your foot?

Remember this is human-facilitated on-demand reproduction, so there's no grey goo. You're probably the only person on this thread so far that gets that bit.

On Mars we can synthesize the carbon and rubber from atmospheric CO2 and water, draw up a couple thousand yards of wire, and make a tire in an appropriate time. It all changes when you have access to energy, and that means nuclear.

Yours,

Doug Goncz Replikon Research (via aol.com)

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On 02 Sep 2003 19:48:19 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com.pif ( Doug Goncz ) pixelated:

Blame it on the engineers of the group. You know how THEY get. (Huh? You're one? Oh, sorry.)

Y'mean "when there are two"? But it could be 2+ dissimilar models as long as you have all the capabilities of both in both.

Hell's Bells, boy. I misunderstood that -entirely-. I thought that you just put the pairs into a dark room and they did the metallic stiffy stuffin' until they had reproduced themselves. Never mind. ;)

Oh, you may say that this lifetime, but what about the others? Shucks, I forgot #10. You HAVE read The 10 Rules for Being Human, right? Well, in case you haven't, here they are:

Rules for Being Human

1. You will receive a body: You may like it, or hate it, but it'll be yours for the entire period this time around.

1. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in an informal full-time school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons, or think they are irrelevant and stupid.

2. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately works.

1. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it you can go on to the next lesson.

2. Learning lessons do not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

1. "There" is no better than "here". When your "there" becomes a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here".

2. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

1. What you make of life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

2. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life's questions lie inside of you. All you need to do is to look, listen, and trust.

1. You will forget all of this.

- Source Unknown

Oh, they seldom bite me on the feet, but my legs, butt, hip, arms, shoulders, back, neck, head, hands, and fingers get nibbled a lot. I'm surrounded by machines.

No goo? What fun is that?

P.S: I wonder what the robots think about all this... ------------------------------ REAL men don't need free plans ------------------------------

REAL websites

Huge snip Having read this thread and understanding some of it all I can say is that there are a few people here who need to get laid! Tim disregard the previous statement. lg no neat sig line

Doug,

This is a kool idea, as many of your posts are (even drill press abuse). I have two comments - 1. you have not shown proof that "two of everything" or even "two of anything" is the smallest number required and 2. I think replication without evolution is undesirable.

Early man used sticks and stones as tools. Everything we currently have (good and bad) has evolved from those simple beginnings. So I suggest that the minimum number of anything is very close to zero. Send McGiver to Mars with a Swiss Army Knife (and an unlimited supply of bicycle spokes and boot laces) and by the time you get there, you'll have to hunt for a place to park your shuttle between the Bridgeports.

Now project that evolutionary capacity to a capability that may be available in ideal environments and simple replication of current technology may even be undesirable. Grow your lathe ways from a single diamond crystal - now your iron machine tools are as desirable as the barber's leeches. Evolve some more and now you can generate any product by selectively ADDING molecules of the appropriate type to the proper location - why machine by chip REMOVAL? When your razor gets dull, it can be sharpened by replacing the displaced molecules not by abrading until a fresh edge is exposed.

Machine tool self-replication is an excellent philosophy exercise - and that brings me to the next level of evolution. Perhaps we don't really need THINGS as instances of matter, we can just THINK them and therefore don't actually need to perform an actual task or build a particular device to know the cosmic truth. We think through the problems, then we know that we can build that 42-shot-simiautomattic-revolver with each part perfectly heat treated and accurate to a couple of milliangstroms. Now that we know, we don't have to actually build it to prove our knowledge or skill. (Made you think about some old westerns, didn't it?)

Just some ideas to think about.

Bruce

self-replication

disassembly.

Doug Goncz scribed in :

Doug, you'll be interested to see my use of jigging to build a part for my lathe....

using essentially woodworking techniques to make a metal travelling steady for the lathe so that I can (eventually) make leadscrews for the mill/surfacegrinder/whatever I get to next... the CNC surface grinder is high on mylist, just for fun...

swarf, steam and wind

-- David Forsyth -:- the email address is real /"\

\ / ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail > - - - - - - -> X If you receive email saying "Send this to everyone you know," / \ PLEASE pretend you don't know me.

Wayne Bengtsson scribed in :

Hey Doug, thought of a MAG DRILL lately? it processes things much larger than itself and is self guiding after initial placement. one coudl easily use one to drill the holes in the raw part of another one, no matter how big it is...? maybe?

Like the Velcro in my "service occupation" shoes from Payless.

And when things go wrong in the space program, there are usually few massive environmental consequences, unlike Exxon Valdez. But people do give their lives in this field. Not just the astronauts, either. Wasn't there a big explosion at the Shuttle booster plant? I assume someone got hurt in that.

Maybe all I need is a CAD program that can simulate manual control of a machine tool, knowing its parts and constraints, according to a program like NC. Then I can manually select a part, copy it, chuck it up, and see if it is in the work envelope, one by one, without leaving the keyboard and mouse. Do any of you know of a CAD program that can do that? Simulate ways, leadscrews, gibs, and chucks, but not actual cutting?

Yours,

Doug Goncz Replikon Research (via aol.com)

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LOL! I got laid two nights ago, but smoochie was too drunk last night to do anything but talk.... and then snore.

Are you gettin' any?

Darn these antidepressants, they make it difficult sometimes....

Yours,

Doug Goncz Replikon Research (via aol.com)

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"DoN. Nichols" wrote: ...

A minor correction here -- the F00F bug was protection-related,* nothing to do with FP, so a separate FP chip wouldn't have made a difference.

-jiw

• " The F00F bug received its name from its instruction encoding F0 0F C7 C8. This instruction encoding maps to a LOCK CMPXCHG8B EAX instruction. CMPXCHG8B compares 64-bit memory contents with the contents in EDX and EAX." "Instead, the Pentium processor locks up and freezes the entire computer when it encounters this instruction."

- from a web page re F00F

Sounds like the mechanical version of a (software) virus...

What's your definition of an entity? Seems there are programs (or could be) capable of creating equal, and perhaps better programs.

Dave

Mathcad is one of my favorite programs. I'm suprised people don't use it more often, so much nicer than spreadsheets for so many things.

Dave

Or better yet, colonize it with machines..... :)

A compiler, for example...

More useful examples are things like learning systems; there are systems that develop a program expressed as a series of rules. It runs tests against past data in which each rule is assessed for how much it helped, and bad rules removed, and good rules duplicated and variations tried. Solutions evolve automatically.

A spectacular case in point... some group decided to use an FPGA (programmable digital logic chip; you feed in setup instructions to tell it what gates to wire to what, more or less), along with an evolving engine like that above, to evolve a circuit to work out the frequency of a train of pulses. The FPGA was too small (not enough gates) to contain the circuit you'd get if you designed it by hand.

Sure enough, it soon came up with a working design... but the way it had managed to do better than what was thought to be the theoretical capacity of the chip was that it wasn't using them just as digital logic gates any more. It had gates wired back into themselves in unstable feedback loops, using their analogue characteristics (which you steer clear of in digital design!). Which was fine - but as soon as the temperature changed, the chip's analogue characteristics shifted and the circuit stopped working :-) They'd trained it in a stable temperature environment, so it had evolved to need that...

ABS

Top posting:

I love that Google lets me reply to my own post, 9 years later.

I added these questions to my LinkedIn profile. I am looking for mathematician machinists.

Is there a minimal self-reproducing universal machine tool (SRMT) design?

Would a minimal SRMT design have the minimal feature set, the minimal component set, and the minimal sets of assemblies and superassemblies?

Are there any SRMT designs with one to one bijective or one to many surjective mappings between atomic feature types and SRMT configurations?

Is there a one to one bijective mapping between the 13 orthogonal coordinate systems and corresponding minimal native coordinate system SRMT designs?

Are therer any of the 13 orthogonal coordinate systems in which one of the most basic SRMT components, say a cap screw, or a bearing ball, cannot be modeled?

Doug Goncz Replikon Research Seven Corners, VA 22044 Alexandria, VA 22314

703-475-7456

Remember the drill press mill days? I still have it. I still use it. I only made one of the integral drill jigs, though. I never replicated that key reproducible part.

Giganews does, too.

I would try these questions in "comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica" and the like.

Joe Gwinn

Joe,

I have, a few times. I am now looking for people on LinkedIn. Mathematician machinist types.

I am pretty sure all I need to do to demonstrate self-reproduction of my Super Shop is add a centerless grinder for the way tubes.

Mathematically, I see

a set of unparameterized "atomic" feature types such as screw thread, hole, block, step, and the like, under a set of parametrized features such as 3/8-16x2 inch female UNC 2B hole, under

a set of atomic part types such as 3/8-16 machine nut, under

a set of Bill of Materials parts such as the 3/8-16 nut holding the lead screw to the right lead screw bed bearing and a set of stock parts such as a 4 inch,

0.040 inch thick, 1 inch arbor hole, 260 tooth saw blade in HSS, under

a set of assemblies such as the carriage, the bed, the tool post, the spindle, an auxiliary spindle, and the like, under

a set of assembly and superassembly configurations such a milling mode, thread cutting mode, sawing mode,

SUCH THAT

each atomic feature type is in one to one correspondence with one of the configurations,

AND

each atomic feature is in one to one correspondence with a configuration at a particular setting of all of its various movable, driven, and clampable axes.

That is my peculiar obsession.

"Under" seems to mean "referred to by" or "defining".

I could cross post something to sci.math and rcm. Maybe that would catch the right eyes to move this 30 year old project along.

Julian Leland at Swarthmore made one recently. A self-reproducing (NC) milling machine that makes all the brackets to bolt together all the frame bits supporting its stock spindle motor and drive and its stock 3 axis linear motion table.

Since 1979 I have not hear of anything similar other than the Frankenmill I threw together in 1997 to prove the concept. That got written up in a footnote in KSRM in 2004.

I have jury duty today and can't sleep.

Doug

When? I don't recall the posting.

I bet they are not so common. Pure math types are a danger to themselves in a machine shop. I'd try the Applied Math department.

War story: When I was in school, I had a young math professor (taught me linear algebra) who invited us students to an academic tea at his nearby house, which was made of stone. Where I saw him using a hammerdrill to install some electrical component, like an outlet box. I was amazed - I don't think any of the other math professors could have done anything of the kind. My professor soon left the math dept to found a new dept on applied math.

This actually sounds more like object-oriented programming and data modeling, both being under Computer Science.

Is there a diagnostic code for this?

Actually, NASA is thinking about such things in general, to come up with ways to build a moonbase without having to haul all the components up from Earth. The basic idea is a nuclear reactor powering a 3D laser printer that fuses moon dust into building blocks and components.

Joe Gwinn