An Embryonics Implementation of a Self-Replicating Universal Turing Machine

The goal of this contribution is to describe how a universal Turing machine was embedded into a hardware system in order to verify the computational universality of a novel architecture. This implementation was realized with a multicellular automaton inspired by the embryonic development of living organisms. In such an architecture, every artificial “cell” contains a complete copy of the description of the machine, a redundancy that allows the introduction of the properties of self-repair and self-replication. These properties were coupled with a modified version of the W-machine to realize a robust, self-replicating universal computer in actual hardware.