Self-Replicating Strands that Self-Assemble into User-Specified Meshes

Robert Ewaschuk; Peter Turney

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · cs/0502087

Self-Replicating Strands that Self-Assemble into User-Specified Meshes

Robert Ewaschuk·Peter Turney

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

It has been argued that a central objective of nanotechnology is to make products inexpensively, and that self-replication is an effective approach to very low-cost manufacturing. The research presented here is intended to be a step towards this vision. In previous work (JohnnyVon 1.0), we simulated machines that bonded together to form self-replicating strands. There were two types of machines (called types 0 and 1), which enabled strands to encode arbitrary bit strings. However, the information encoded in the strands had no functional role in the simulation. The information was replicated without being interpreted, which was a significant limitation for potential manufacturing applications. In the current work (JohnnyVon 2.0), the information in a strand is interpreted as instructions for assembling a polygonal mesh. There are now four types of machines and the information encoded in a strand determines how it folds. A strand may be in an unfolded state, in which the bonds are straight (although they flex slightly due to virtual forces acting on the machines), or in a folded state, in which the bond angles depend on the types of machines. By choosing the sequence of machine types in a strand, the user can specify a variety of polygonal shapes. A simulation typically begins with an initial unfolded seed strand in a soup of unbonded machines. The seed strand replicates by bonding with free machines in the soup. The child strands fold into the encoded polygonal shape, and then the polygons drift together and bond to form a mesh. We demonstrate that a variety of polygonal meshes can be manufactured in the simulation, by simply changing the sequence of machine types in the seed.

Explore related subjects

cs.NE cs.CE cs.MA

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Robert Ewaschuk, Peter Turney. 2005-02-22. Self-Replicating Strands that Self-Assemble into User-Specified Meshes. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0502087

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Mobility-Aware Mobile Edge Computing for Energy-Balanced Data Collection in IoT-Enabled Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) face critical challenges in energy imbalance, connectivity, and data collection due to harsh environments. To address these issues, this paper focuses on the problem is how to achieve energy-balanced data collection in IoT-enabled UWSNs with a mobility-aware mobile edge computing (MEC), named MECEBDC. Unlike existing approaches, the proposed scheme jointly optimizes energy-aware clustering, cluster head selection, and AUV-assisted data collection. Furthermore, we design a novel metaheuristic-based AUV routing algorithm that incorporates realistic underwater mobility dynamics, explicitly considering gravitational pressure and buoyancy forces acting on the AUV. By leveraging the computing, storage, and mobility capabilities of MEC-enabled AUVs, the proposed approach enables efficient trajectory planning and adaptive data gathering in a stable 3D underwater environment. Extensive simulations and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces node energy consumption, improves data collection efficiency, and prolongs network lifetime compared with existing schemes, making it well suited for long-term underwater IoT applications.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

From Admission to Retention: Predicting Durable Offspring in Quality-Diversity Search

Automated failure discovery can be framed as a diversity problem: the objective is to expose distinct ways a system fails rather than a single critical adversarial case. Yet uniform parent sampling provides no way to allocate search effort toward individuals likely to produce durable archive contributions. We study this credit assignment problem in an unstructured Quality-Diversity (QD) archive, testing whether signals available before an individual has reproduced distinguish offspring that merely enter the archive from those still retained generations later. Across a planar-arm benchmark and two robotic-locomotion tasks, the same signals are often associated with entry and persistence in opposite directions. In particular, lineage depth is the clearest such signal, and its persistence discrimination grows with population capacity, which is associated with lower turnover. Biasing parent selection toward the signals with the strongest measured association to survival nevertheless does not improve search: moderate bias matches uniform sampling, and strong bias reduces QD-score.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Knowledge-Guided Memetic Algorithm for Capacitated Arc Routing Problems with Time-Dependent Service Costs

The capacitated arc routing problem with time-dependent service costs (CARPTDSC) is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem that arises from real-world applications. CARPTDSC has two main challenges in reducing computational time. First, it is an NP-hard problem. Second, the time-dependent service costs of tasks require frequent evaluations during the search process, significantly increasing the computational burden. These challenges make it difficult for existing algorithms to perform efficient searches, often resulting in limited efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes a knowledge-guided memetic algorithm with golden section search and negatively correlated search (KGMA-GN), where two knowledge-guided strategies are introduced to improve efficiency. First, a knowledge-guided initialization strategy (KGIS) is proposed to generate high-quality initial solutions to speed up convergence. Second, a knowledge-guided small-step-size local search strategy (KGSLSS) is proposed to filter out invalid moves, thereby reducing unnecessary evaluations. Experimental results on five benchmark test sets, including both small- and larger-scale instances, demonstrate that KGMA-GN achieves higher search efficiency than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study further confirms that the knowledge-guided local search operators in KGSLSS can significantly reduce runtime compared to traditional operators, especially for the knowledge-guided swap operator, which achieves more than a tenfold improvement in speed.

cs.NE↗