alt Hacker NewsSomewhat famously with life, you aren't necessarily replicating the same thing at the end as you are at the beginning, which is an awkward property for an engineered system.
Somewhat famously with life, you aren't necessarily replicating the same thing at the end as you are at the beginning, which is an awkward property for an engineered system.
So that adds some extra "benefits" (mutation and natural selection improves the probes over time) along with some extra difficulties - how do you keep the self-reproducing probes "on-task" from one generation to the next? How do you instill "explore and report home" as an innate goal to a mutating system?