At 03:36 PM 4/8/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
As someone who was a Gerard O'Neill <http://www.ssi.org/obit.html> fan long
The L-5 dude? I never knew he dabbled in mental-nano-masturbation. I'm familiar with his macroscopic living-in-$pace speculations.
The term von Neumann machine also refers to the idea of a self-reproducing machine, which was first examined in a rigorous manner and popularized by John von Neumann who called it a "Universal Constructor." In principle, if a machine (for example an industrial robot) could be given enough
Just remember that Johnny was playing symbol-games, having a little cellular automata fun to prove it could be done. Not really surprising once you "get" the concept of a description-of-a-machine being processed by a machine. BTW, surely you can find a better ref than Wpedia?