In cytology, mitosis is a complicated process when a cell splits into two identical sets in two daughter nuclei. The chromosomes line up inside the nucleus of the cell and then each one splits in half. In human body, the DNA splits in half, but it has a way of replicating. After the DNA has made copies of itself, each cell divides and becomes two cells.
What if a man-made device or machine could replicate itself like a cell?
In 1948, a Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann proposed a kinematic self-reproducing automaton model, which he named as "Universal Constructor". A self-replicating machine would need to have the capacity to gather energy and raw materials, process the raw materials into finished components, and then assemble them into a copy of itself.
"Proposed demonstration of simple robot self-replication", NASA Conference Publication 2255 (1982), based on the Advanced Automation for Space Missions NASA/ASEE summer study Held at the University of Santa Clara in Santa Clara, California, from June 23-August 29, 1980.
In 1956 mathematician Edward F. Moore proposed the first known suggestion for a practical real-world self-replicating machine, published in Scientific American. Moore's "artificial living plants" were proposed as machines able to use air, water and soil as sources of raw materials and to draw its energy from sunlight via a solar battery or a steam engine. He chose the seashore as an initial habitat for such machines, giving them easy access to the chemicals in seawater, and suggested that later generations of the machine could be designed to float freely on the ocean's surface as self-replicating factory barges or to be placed in barren desert terrain that was otherwise useless for industrial purposes. The self-replicators would be "harvested" for their component parts, to be used by humanity in other non-replicating machines.
Sustainable or destructable: Self-replicating object with Phylogenomics ability.
Phylogenomics is a method of assigning a function to a gene based on its evolutionary history in a Phylogenetic tree. Phylogenomics uses knowledge on the evolution of a gene to improve function prediction.
