From Idea to Reality: Designing and Building Self-Reproducing Machines in the Mid-20th Century

Abstract

Alan Turing’s development of a theory of universal computation in the 1930s [293], followed by the appearance of the first digital computers in the 1940s, allowed people to experiment with processes of logical self-reproduction—that is, self-reproduction implemented in software without the extra difficulties entailed by physical self-reproduction. The 1940s and, in particular, the 1950s saw the emergence of the first rigorous theoretical work on the design of self-reproducing machines, and of the first implementations of artificial self-reproducing systems in software (logical self-reproduction) and in hardware (physical self-reproduction).