The machines are taking over!!
One day there were these two guys. Let’s call them Adrian and Vik, because that’s what their names are. They thought to themselves, “Well hey… If we can get a machine to build another machine, why can’t we get a machine to build a copy of itself? If the original machine is designed to build a second machine, and then builds it, surely the second machine will then also start copying itself and make a third machine.
This has just happened.
Adrian and Vik meet the end of civilization as we know it with the typical “oh I didn’t know it would take over the universe. I just wanted to see if it could make more of itself” kind of expressions on their faces that you would have seen on God’s just after he “saw that it was good”.
Image source: RepRap blog
From the project’s blog:
A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.
The RepRap project is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.
If you don’t know what a von Neumann Universal Constructor is, click here, then throw back your head and cackle at the ceiling: “It’s aaalllliiiiiivve!!”
Anyway, the point is that the project has made the first machine capable of completely reproducing itself without external aid or intervention.
The duplicated machine has already finished duplicating the first part of it’s own child.
Mwwwahahahahahaha!
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