Re: This week's interesting articles

Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Sun, 29 Nov 1998 08:11:51 -0800

asa@nada.kth.se (Anders Sandberg) writes:
>Merkle, Ralph C.: "Casing an assembler"=20
>http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT6/Papers/Merkle/index.html
>
>About how to case an assembler with a bag of carbon. The fun thing
>isn't necessarily the solutions, but that it is clear that Merkle
>really seems to be moving towards a fairly complete assembler

The design he presented appears flawed. He indicates that the tubes have hemispherical ends yet roll up like a sleeping bag. I don't see how the hemispherical part can be flattened to fit inside the rolled up part, and Ralph doesn't seem to have an answer to this. Possibly a nanohorn (cone-shaped) tip would work. The existence of nanohorns is new enough that they probably haven't been analyzed much yet.

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