Fields Involving Study of Self-replication
Most of the research has occurred in a few areas:
- Biology studies natural replication and replicators, and their interaction. These can be an important guide to avoid design difficulties in self-replicating machinery.
- Memetics studies ideas and how they propagate in human culture. Memes require only small amounts of material, and therefore have theoretical similarities to viruses and are often described as viral.
- Nanotechnology or more precisely, molecular nanotechnology is concerned with making nano scale assemblers. Without self-replication, capital and assembly costs of molecular machines become impossibly large.
- Space resources: NASA has sponsored a number of design studies to develop self-replicating mechanisms to mine space resources. Most of these designs include computer-controlled machinery that copies itself.
- Computer security: Many computer security problems are caused by self-reproducing computer programs that infect computers — computer worms and computer viruses.
- In parallel computing, it takes a long time to manually load a new program on every node of a large computer cluster or distributed computing system. Automatically loading new programs using mobile agents can save the system administrator a lot of time and give users their results much quicker, as long as they don't get out of control.
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