A Self-Replicating Universal Turing Machine: From von Neumann's Dream to New Embryonic Circuits

Borrowing inspiration from von Neumann's dream and the idea of a true cellular automaton, we describe a multicellular universal Turing machine implementation with self-replication and self-repair capabilities. This implerrientation was made possible thanks to a new “multicellular” automaton developed as part of the Embryonics (embryonic electronics) project. This new automaton, in which every artificial cell contains a complete copy of the geriome, is endowed with self-replication and selfrepair capabilities. With these properties arid by using a modified version of the W-machine, it was possible to realize the mapping of the universal Turing machine onto our multicellular array