Wheel of Topics #29

Most of you know the belt and deep belt encounter named the Von Neumann swarm. They are a swarm of Von Neumann machine. Von Neumann machines are self-replicating machines, or, in simple word, machines that build copies of themselves.

Von Neumann machines get their name from the first scientist to seriously study a form of self-replicating device(a simple program working without an computer). This man was John Von Neumann (born Neumann Jànos, from Hungary), a mathematician and physician that worked on many subject. One of those subject was the hydrodynamic of explosion(how fluid react to the forces generated by explosion, if I'm not mistaken(air is a fluid)). His expertise in this domain lead him to become involved in the "Manhattan Project" for relatively obvious reason. Although he did made some serious research on S-R machine, his full work about it where only published long after his death.

The term "Von Neumann machine" is not really a good one for S-R machine, because it also used for a conceptual model of a computer architecture(haven't search on that for now). The actual term should be "universal constructor"(a term he made). Goodnigth to you all.

Grim the pirate