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Comment by calhoun137 | Hacker News Reader

I am so happy to see this article about Von Neumann on HN!!! I have been posting about him on here for years, and have read all his books, but not as many of his papers as I would like, they are really hard! I have been working for many years now on continuing his theories of weather control technology and self-replicating machines. He is my absolute personal hero and the scientist who, far above all others, I consider to be the one in whose footsteps I want to follow.

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That's interesting! Have you made progress on self-replication? I think it's a very important problem. I've made some notes categorized under topics/self-replication.html in http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano-20191110.tar.gz, but of course I'm no Johnny von Neumann.

Von Nueman is on the record as saying he believed computers were a sub field of self replicating machines. I believe they will be very important in the future and will have many applications.

Not really, unfortunately. I think it would be fun to build a 3d printer that can replicate itself, but have not tried building any prototypes because besides being too expensive I also havent taken my research into that far enough. I am a very ambitious person and have big plans for the future! What I have done on this subject besides reading about it is very theoretical and abstract, its more of an aspiration right now than an active research project to be completely honest.

I'm interested to hear what you think; my notes talk a lot about how to make things less expensive.

You may want to check out https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap which is exactly this type of 3D printer. I don’t think it’s 100% though.

Well, RepRap has the philosophy that self-replicating systems such as hedgehogs and raspberries need some definite set of “vitamins” available prefabricated in their environment for self-replication, and RepRap chose things like threaded rod, NEMA motors, hotends, and Arduinos as their vitamins. This was extremely successful at making 3-D printers mainstream — every popular 3-D printer out there derives from RepRap designs — but not at producing an exponentially growing quantity of 3-D printers printed by 3-D printers.

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