Re: Bye Bye Grey Goo


rhooker123@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Thats pretty much self replication anyway, but the way ants to do.

There are a lot of ants and bees working on the same principle. In the
end its the numbers that make for grey good.


Not quite, ants don't wipe out their own colonies when they're not
actively doing anything else.

The problem with the "One nanobot does everything" approach is that only
one nanobot has to have its control systems damaged in order to cause
runaway self-replication. When you're done with the task at hand, you
have to tell them to self-destruct and hope they were all listening.

By assigning the functions of assembling and resource gathering to
different nanobots, you gain the capability of cutting off the supply of
resources. Regardless of how they're programmed, assemblers would be
incapable of building anything when the feedstock ran dry.
Since the disassemblers wouldn't be capable of self-replication, this
would limit the destructive capabilities of the system.

Another issue is whether a single set of instructions is broadcast to
all nanobots, or a separate copy has to be produced for each nanobot to
follow.

In the first instance, you should assume that some nanobots just don't
get the new instructions when you reprogram the system. You need a way
to remove or disable the nanobots following the old instructions,
without disabling all the nanobots that are actually doing what you want.
In the second instance, when you stop issuing the old instructions, you
know there are a limited number of copies of the old ones floating
around in the system. If each copy can only be read one time, then
eventually all existing copies of old instructions will be depleted. Of
course, in this case you need something capable of replicating the
instructions, which is why I suggested programmer bots in my earlier
post. Remove the programmer bots, and eventually the system depletes
the copies of old instructions. That's why I previously wanted to wipe
most of the nanobots out between cycles.

Getting back to the grey goo issue, the grey goo problem really consists
of three independent problems.
1) How do your nanobots know when to stop replicating?
2) How do you stop the disassemblers when you have all the raw
materials you need?
3) How you clean up all those unneeded nanobots afterwards? (The best
way to avoid unintended consequences from leaving nanobots behind is to
leave no nanobots behind.)


The first problem could be solved by a mechanical equivalent of
telomeres. Assemblers could be programmed to self-replicate a limited
number of times, with some sort of counter included in the instructions.
For the new assemblers, the counter is reduced by 1, and the active
assembler decrements its own counter after following the instructions.

For the second problem, the disassemblers can simply be reprogrammed to
dissaemble other disassemblers. This results in a rapidly shrinking
disassembler population.

For the third problem, the assemblers can be reprogrammed to build
disassemblers again, and those disassemblers can be given instructions
to eliminate all nanobots other than disassemblers, followed by
dismantling other disassemblers.



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