In a recent issue of the journal Artificial Life, a group of Canadian researchers says yes despite warnings to the contrary -- most notably from author Michael Crichton in his new book "Prey," about self-replicating nanobots run amok.

To prove their point, the researchers have created a primordial soup that works like a digital DNA factory, where T-shaped "codons" swim in a computer-generated virtual liquid forming single, double, and even triple strands.

Like DNA, these digital particles "can be assembled into patterns that encode" information, claims robotics scientist Peter Turney in a new paper. For the first time ever, "we demonstrate that, if an arbitrary seed pattern is put in a soup of separate individual particles, the pattern will replicate by assembling the individual particles into copies of itself."

Given sufficient time, a soup of separated individual particles will "spontaneously form self-replicating patterns," add Turney and colleagues Arnold Smith from the National Research Council of Canada and Robert Ewaschuk from the University of Waterloo.

Cellular Spontaneity

Spontaneous generation hasn't been this boldly predicted since 16th-century Flemish biologist Jan Baptista van Helmont offered a recipe for the creation of mice.

"Place a dirty shirt or some rags in an open pot or barrel containing a few grains of wheat or some wheat bran, and in 21 days, mice will appear," van Helmont claimed. "There will be adult males and females present, and they will be capable of mating and reproducing more mice."

In the case of digital DNA, however, credit is due another European scientist -- John von Neumann -- for his work on self-replicating cellular automata, a field of mathematics that, after a long hiatus, is now flourishing.

Cellular automata are "simple -- I can teach the model in class in ten minutes, and the underlying assumptions are simplistic," said Ben Gurion University computer science professor Moshe Sipper. "You're basically building a 'universe' from first principles -- which is probably why von Neumann opted to use cellular automata as a model of choice."

Cellular automata recently captured the public interest with the publication of Stephen Wolfram's massive tome on the subject, "A New Kind of Science." Among scientists, however, resurgent interest in cellular automata " has been taking place for the past decade, due primarily to the vast increase in computer power ," explained Sipper, who is also a visiting professor in the Logic Systems Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Ten years ago, "simulating a complex cellular automata scheme was cumbersome and today it is much easier," Sipper told NewsFactor.

JohnnyVon

Tongue firmly in cheek, Turney and his fellow researchers have given the nod to von Neumann by nicknaming their project "JohnnyVon". JohnnyVon, however, offers a considerable advance over cellular automata by functioning in a "continuous space" that better approximates real-world conditions.

"Cellular automata involve a discrete grid space, like the squares on a checkerboard," Sipper explained. "There is a big gap between these models and the real world. By moving to a continuous space model, we move a step closer to the real world and thus a step closer to actual self-replicating machines."

Nanometer-scale robots running the JohnnyVon program might be "the key to low-cost manufacturing," environmental cleanup, or any application requiring large quantities of robotic helping hands, Turney told NewsFactor. "Self-replication can make such large quantities economically feasible," he added.

Self-replication "is essential to nano-technology," Sipper agreed. "We want to build one tiny machine that will go forth and replicate -- but not multiply ad infinitum."

A built-in fail-safe automatically prevents JohnnyVon from infinite self-replication, Turney explained. Once the program runs out of codons to assemble, it stops.

"It's as if we had discovered a way to make Lego bricks self assemble into finished structures," Turney told NewsFactor. "Once all the loose Lego bricks are used up, the process necessarily halts."