Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle,Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 2004.
John von Neumann [3] “was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary, and died in Washington, D.C., on February 8, 1957. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Budapest and an undergraduate chemistry degree from the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1930 he came to the United States as a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, where he was made full professor in 1931. In 1933 he joined the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study as a professor and retained that post for the rest of his life.”
Von Neumann [3,300,301] began studying automata replication because he was interested in very complex machines and their behaviors. Von Neumann had a tremendous range of interests – he contributed to the logical foundations of quantum theory, was the co-inventor of the theory of games, and he worked on the Manhattan Project (contributing to the design of the implosion mechanism for the plutonium bomb). It is believed that his participation in the Manhattan Project and the tremendous volume of calculations* necessary for bomb design led him into automatic computing. Hearing of the ENIAC computer project at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, von Neumann was fascinated by the potential of a computer very much faster than any of the devices that had previously been produced [1011]. In the early 1940s there existed only simple relay machines and analog devices such as the differential analyzer. But the new electronic machines that interested von Neumann** promised to be perhaps millions of times faster than relay machines.
Von Neumann immersed himself in the ENIAC project, the first electronic computer program where some actual useful computing was produced. In late 1945 and early 1946, the first problems that were put on ENIAC are believed to have been calculations involving the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb. Von Neumann, although he remained very much interested in nuclear energy and was appointed a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, was more fascinated with the idea of large and complex computing machines. He devised the organization still employed today in almost all general purpose computational machines – the concept of a serially processed stored program [1011], or the “von Neumann architecture” or “von Neumann machine.” After that work was completed he began thinking seriously about the problems of extremely large machines – their reliability, programming, design, and how to understand what they do – and he became involved with the many possible analogies to the complex behaviors of living systems [305,306].
Last updated on 1 August 2005