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> Has this been thought about?

I'm not aware of artificial examples but this is essentially how biology works at the protein level - so it does work at least at the molecular scale.

In principle it should also work at larger scales although it would probably be much slower, molecules jiggle very quickly.

Programmable magnets (aka "polymagnets") may be applicable to doing it at a larger scale.

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-8MP7g8XOE

I would argue that a self-replicating machine could be a slight modification of this idea. Print some blocks and put them in a container and shake them. Then come up with some structure, made up of these blocks, that will cause a copy of itself to emerge when shaking, that would have never or extremely rarely occurred if the parent structure had not been present.

https://rosieresearch.com/self-assembling-bricks/