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#380 – Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication
Lex Fridman Podcast
How to Bootstrap a Civilization
Turing gave us our notion of computational universality and something that sounds deep and turns out to be trivial. Almost everything is computationally universal so Norm Margolis wrote a beautiful paper with Tom Taffelly showing a cellular automata world like the game of life where you just move tokens around they showed that modeling billiard balls on a billiard table with cellular automata is a universal computer. To be universal you need a persistent state you need a non-linear operation to interact them and you need connectivitySo that's what you need to show computational universality. The heart of this whole conversation is morphogenesis which is how small information in the genome can give rise to the complexity of who you
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