Imagine a factory where robots are constructing other robots. We know such scenes from the movie I, Robot (Proyas, 2004), where the company U. S. Robotics produces humanoid robots, or an island factory from the theatre play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots; Čapek, 1920). However, these examples are fictional; Such factories have never existed in the real world and still belong to science fiction. But what is the history and the state of the art of self-replicating machines from a scientific and technological point of view? The answer to this question can be found in a recent book, Rise of the Self-Replicators, subtitled as Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve, by Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin.
In the book the journey through the history of self-reproducing and self-evolving objects starts in Chapter 2 in the seventeenth century. The very early works...