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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Engineering becomes Biology, November 11, 2006
In our lab this is universally known as "The Bunny Book", for reasons that you can deduce by looking at the cover. You may also deduce that we refer to it sufficiently frequently to have given it a nickname. The reason it is simple - it is an outstandingly comprehensive work of reference for all the ideas and history in the burgeoning field of artificial replication.
Biology is the study of things that copy themselves. It used to be that the only examples we had of such things were those that had come about naturally by Darwin's Law of Evolution. But for the first time we are entering an age of intelligent design, with the only intelligence available to do the designing being our own. People are starting to build biological machines to go along with the natural living machines (including ourselves) that have evolved; at the small scale they are mostly doing this using the construction kit supplied by biochemistry; at the large scale they are simply using the ordinary mechanical and electronic components of conventional engineering.
This is one of the main the books upon which the biological revolution that will result will be founded. None of the consequent creations (nor our children) can escape Darwin's Law, of course - that is as fundamental as the Second Law of Thermodynamics upon which it depends. But we are adding an extra source of change to the random mutations that have driven evolution for three and a half billion years: thought-out innovation deduced from accurate scientific models of how matter, energy, and information behave.
Buy this book to get in at the start of the revolution that will give us the most exciting, terrible, and wonderful machines that have ever been made.
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Best book every written on Self-Replicating Machines, December 6, 2004
As one of the nearly 100 technical reviewers for this book, I found this is a "must read" that will likely become THE classic reference for self-replicating machine systems. If you are familiar with Freitas' previous work (especially Nanomedicine, volumes I and II, but also the NASA Ames summer study http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/), then you'll know what to expect, and you won't be disappointed. And with the addition of Ralph Merkle's genius, I'm not surprised that the book is as good as it is.
Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines is an impressively thorough compendium of everything that's known, or has ever been done, in this field, including all theoretical and experimental efforts. The treatment is literally encyclopedic, with over 3000 literature references, hundreds of illustrations, and descriptions of several working systems which have already been built and operated in laboratory settings. KSRM is a surprising readable book that's an important resource for anyone interested in machine self-replication. If you want to learn about the history (all the way from Descartes) to this year's state of the art, especially self-replication of hardware as opposed to software, then this book is the one to get. Yes, it's a bit expensive, but it is truly a magnificent resource.
The book contains an exhaustive history of self-replicating machines, including von Neumann's studies and information-based replicators like computer viruses, proposals for self-replicating factories and actual achievements of self-replicating devices, and a complete discussion of proposals for microscale replicators which includes a description (for context) of the many ways biology replicates.
The authors also provide a new general taxonomy of replicators with a 137-dimensional classification system that subsumes all known actual and proposed self-replicating machine systems (though I'm sure that future systems and proposals will include more). No taxonomy ever proposed has come anywhere close to this level of comprehensiveness and specificity. There's also a technical discussion of many theoretical issues involving replicators, including replication time, minimum replicator size, replicator complexity, the exponential mathematics of replication and replicative manufacturing systems, and lots more.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about self-replication (from science fiction claiming to be based on fact, to ramblings by royalty - thank goodness for the Revolution), so it is really nice to see someone cover all the technical details in one place. The authors distinguish self-replication from self-reproduction, and in their discussion of "Replicators and Public Safety" and elsewhere it is clearly explained how to build safe self-replicating machines that cannot continue functioning in the face of variations, and how to mitigate or eliminate entirely the dangers inherent in possible runaway behaviors of successful machine self-replication processes that might be theorized. Reading this book makes you realize that a vast amount of work has already been done, but a great deal more remains to be done. KSRM is a significant landmark along the road to our technological future and urges us to pursue many possible pathways to practical success, including most prominently several approaches to molecular manufacturing involving nanotechnology and molecular assemblers (www.MolecularAssembler.com).
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