Optimal seeding of self-reproducing systems.
This article is motivated by the need to minimize the number of elements required to establish a self-reproducing system. One such system is a self-reproducing extraterrestrial robotic colony, which reduces the launch payload mass for space exploration compared to current mission configurations. In this work, self-reproduction is achieved by the actions of a robot on available resources. An important consideration for the establishment of any self-reproducing system is the identification of a seed, for instance, a set of resources and a set of robots that utilize them to produce all of the robots in the colony. This article outlines a novel algorithm to determine an optimal seed for self-reproducing systems, with application to a self-reproducing extraterrestrial robotic colony. Optimality is understood as the minimization of a cost function of the resources and, in this article, the robots. Since artificial self-reproduction is currently an open problem, the algorithm is illustrated with a simple robotic self-replicating system from the literature and with a more complicated self-reproducing example from nature.
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. amenezes@berkeley.edu
Amor A
AA
Menezes
Pierre T
PT
Kabamba
D000465:Algorithms; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012371:Robotics; D013026:Space Flight