Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so cells that can process and actuate, each cell can like move one degree of freedom or attach or detach or process.
Now, those elements I just described, we can make out of the still smaller parts.
So eventually there's a hierarchy of the little parts make little robots that make bigger parts of bigger robots up through that hierarchy.
Right.
Early on, I tried to go in a straight line from the bottom to the top, and that ended up being a bad idea.
Instead, we're kind of doing all of these in parallel, and then they're growing together.
And so to make the larger scale structures, like there's a lot of hype right now about 3D printing houses where you have a printer the size of the house.
We're right now working on using swarms of these table scale robots that walk on the structures to place the parts much more efficiently.
That's amazing.
That'll come.
That'll come in stages.
So that's at the heart of all of this.
In the stack I described, so one student, Will Langford, made these micro robots out of little parts that then were using for Mian as bigger robots up through this hierarchy.
And it's really realizing this idea of the self-reproducing automata.
So von Neumann, when I complained about the von Neumann architecture...
It's not fair to von Neumann because he never claimed it as his architecture.
He really wrote about it in this one fairly dreadful memo that led to all sorts of lawsuits and fights about the early days of computing.
He did beautiful work on reliable computation and unreliable devices.
And towards the end of his life, what he studied was how, and I have to say this precisely, how a computation communicates its own construction.
So a computation can store a description of how to build itself.
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