Fun_People Archive
7 May
A LEGO Factory that Makes LEGO Cars

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue,  7 May 96 15:17:31 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: A LEGO Factory that Makes LEGO Cars

Forwarded-by: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Forwarded-by: Wendell Craig Baker <wbaker@splat.baker.com>

      http://www.lucifer.com/~sean/BT/8.html
      By Sean Morgan <sean@aurex.com>

A LEGO Factory that Makes LEGO Cars

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the Univerity of
Massachusetts (http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/UG/lego/home.html) has built a
mini-factory that builds LEGO(&reg;) cars.  The remarkable thing about this
is that the factory is built out of LEGO.

If they could build a LEGO factory to make more LEGO factories, we would
have a macroscale Von Neumann replicator. Figuring out the systems design
for that could shed light on how molecular nanotechnology will work some day
(see my http://www.lucifer.com/~sean/N-FX/macro.html).

© 1996 Peter Langston