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科学|诺奖得主Wilczek：通向自我复制的机器之路( 二 )

诺贝尔奖 科技 科学 科普


用现成的3D打印机、计算机和原材料所构建的系统肯定是笨拙和低效的 。 如果有一天 ， 科学家们能够从生物中学到如何根据编码在DNA上的指令来制造分子机器 ， 那么冯 · 诺依曼的愿景将更接近实用 。 要记住 ， 他早期的电脑模型是在真空电子管时代提出的 ， 这同样超越了当时的技术 。
能自我复制的机器可以释放指数增长的魔力 ， 或许能让一些大胆的工程成为现实 。 它们或许能让将其他天体地球化的科幻梦想变得触手可及 。 而最深刻的或许是 ， 通过呈现生物学的深层结构 ， 生命与非生命的界限终将变得模糊 。
英文版
Advances in technology will soon allow us to build machines that replicate themselves and evolve like living beings.
【科学|诺奖得主Wilczek：通向自我复制的机器之路】Throughout history, creative human engineers have taken inspiration from artifacts of the biological world. Leonardo da Vinci designed flying machines, submarines and tanks with birds, fish and tortoises in mind. Today, artificial neural nets, a computer architecture directly inspired by animal nervous systems, are the cutting edge of machine learning. But none of those applications get to the deep structure of biology-likely a beacon of future creativity.
As the Nobel biologist Paul Nurse explains in his recent book “What is Life?,” the deep structure of life is the existence of physical units (cells or organisms) that can reproduce themselves, allowing small variations. Those ingredients-reproduction and variation-together drive evolution by natural selection. They generate a diverse population that can survive changes and exploit new opportunities. Those that succeed will be those that breed.
Remarkably similar tricks, working on different scales, underlie many other key biological processes. Embryos develop from single cells into mature organisms after several stages of growth (in humans, a few dozen), where each stage differs a little from the previous. Thus, the fertilized egg’s diverse progeny eventually includes heart, liver and brain cells. The “right” kind of cell emerges in response to signals in its local physical and chemical environment, in a kind of guided miniature evolution. Less specialized stem cells can re-ignite this mini-evolution in response to injury or, in the case of skin, gut and blood cells, death by wear-and-tear.
Though he worked in equations and diagrams rather than artistic renderings, John von Neumann was a visionary modern engineer on the level of da Vinci. He gave us game theory and the so-called “von Neumann architecture,” featuring stored programs and random-access memory, that is the foundation for almost all present-day computers. Some of his early ideas connecting quantum mechanics with information theory are only now becoming widely appreciated, in the “second quantum revolution.”
At the time of his death in 1957, at the age of 54, von Neumann was well into a major new project. His unfinished manuscript, edited by Arthur Burns into the book "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata," is monumentally impressive. In it, he gives precise designs for mathematical models of objects he called “universal replicators.” They consist of three basic parts: a machine A that can gather resources and assemble things following a program, a program B that instructs A how to make desired products, and a master program C that instructs A how to make A + B + C.

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