To evolve or not to evolve? That is the question

• Published in: The 2019 Conference on Artificial Life
• Main Authors: Ellery, Alex, Eiben, A. E.
• Other Authors: Fellermann, Harold, Bacardit, Jaume, Goñi-Moreno, Ángel, Füchslin, Rudolf M.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2019
• Subjects: /dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/life_below_water; name=SDG 14 - Life Below Water; South pole
• Online Access: https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/9d1ff6d8-0829-4e17-989c-7700fcf39a7c; https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00187; https://hdl.handle.net/1871.1/9d1ff6d8-0829-4e17-989c-7700fcf39a7c; http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079138715&partnerID=8YFLogxK; http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85079138715&partnerID=8YFLogxK

To evolve or not to evolve? That is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of grey goo, or to deny evolution to a sea of self-replicators and by prevention control them? We have been developing a physical self-replicating machine concept for deployment on the Moon built from local resources on the Moon. Here, we are concerned with architectural issues - we specifically address the problem of uncontrolled replication. We propose a multitiered approach to prevent this: (i) denial of self-replication through the implementation of centralised mass manufacturing of replicators; (ii) denial of scarce sodium and chlorine from Earth acts as an Earth-controlled kill switch in preventing further replication; (iii) denial of centralised supplies of asteroidal metals (tungsten-nickel-cobalt-selenium) at the lunar south pole acts as a Moon-controlled kill switch; (iv) denial of online learning capacity through fixed neural weights; (v) denial of extended computing resources through the elimination of transmit communications between self-replicators; (vi) denial of evolutionary capacity by implementing error detection and correction (EDAC) coding. Two kill switches and EDAC provide the backbone to our approach that maintain self-replication capability.