About self-replication

Chess has been played by people vs. computers for some time and the humans did not always win. Can we say that the computer has intelligence in this case,although it does not have the general intelligence we are accustomed at people?The Turing test was developed in this purpose: it says that a machine is as intelligent as a human being if based on their actions you can’t decide who is who. I think this definition is pretty anthropomorphic as it doesn’t take into consideration the possibility of a machine outsmarting a human being.

Robots are far from being as intelligent as people because they do not understand what they execute, but does a bacterium with no brain understand how its genetic code works? We all agree that bacteria are organisms, but is it because they reproduce or because they use the same type of chemistry as us?  A bacterium is considered a living being while it is stupid while a robot can beat people at chess and they are considered things. Why is that?

Meanwhile I have read a book called “What is life” by Schrödinger which is written by a physicist and not a biologist and this is what makes it so unique.This way I got to the conclusion that a form of life is an assembly of molecules that get exterior energy in order to decrease their internal entropy.

So where is the line between things and organisms? Are robots considered things because they do not reproduce by themselves as organisms do and because they are not a product of reproduction like sterile organisms are? If yes then this is a shaky definition as a robot can recreate one alike. Mechanical self-replication of machines does already happen and it will improve by time.They can obtain materials, manufacture the parts, provide the energy and do all the testing. These assembler robots represent the future of nanotechnology. Computer viruses are also able to self-replicate so how come they are not considered alive?

It seems as ?life as we know it? is different than ?life as it might be?.

P.S. You can read the book at this link:

http://whatislife.stanford.edu/Homepage/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

Welcome to the world of robots!

Robotics is much more of an art rather than a science. This is why I love it so much as I can be creative and precise at the same time. You do not need fancy education to build a robot, just some basic mechanical and electrical skills, a desire to learn and imagination. You will find a lot of theoretical articles here because 90% of the time it takes to build a robot is designing it. The topics I deal with range from different mechanisms useful when considering a certain output, how to model the robot and its environment, biological approaches for different types of locomotion and a lot of other things.

Enjoy!