The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

I’m not really sure how it ended up in my hands, but what he does in that paper is something extraordinary: he managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital. It’s so terribly obscure that it’s no wonder it went ignored and unnoticed at first. Or perhaps it is just one of those things that are too alien to be easily recognized, ideas that require science and technology to mature and develop to a point when they can finally fall to Earth and ripen. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself, as well as a description of how to implement those instructions. In his paper, he divided his theoretical construct—which he called the “automaton”—into three components: the functional part, a decoder that reads the instructions and builds the next copy, and a device that takes that information and inserts it into the new machine. The astounding thing is that right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work, long before anyone had ever glimpsed the strange beauty of the double helix.