Neologism of the day : Vitamin Parts

om nom nom

Is this basically just an excuse to post this picture of a hamster? No. Rubbish etc.

Ok. Vitamin Parts… lets say you were trying to make a completely self-contained self-replicating system that was capable of reproducing itself (ok, it gets energy, materials and initial programming from its environment, but what do you want? A caveat to the laws of thermodynamics?)… like a reprap machine for example. If you managed to get it to a point where it could 100% self-reproduce, with no outisde help, then it would be said to have “closure”.

At the moment the reprap machines are currently at about 60%? 80%? I don’t know. Here’s a picture of an earlyish one

and you can see there are various bits like wires and motors etc that it can’t make itself, and which have to be supplied by helpful humans.

These are know as vitamin parts.

So if say (and I mean this hypothetically), you wanted to make a self-sustaining hamster biosphere, like this one where it can shred its own paper…

… then the hamster weel would be a vitamin part. Actually the hamster itself is a vitamin part as well, unless you have a suitably large gene-pool etc…

Ok, it’s not really a terribly good example, and perhaps the whole thing was just an excuse to post that first picture, but still. You’ve learned something etc. Stop your moaning.