From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Dec 01 1998 - 06:47:45 MST
"Peter C. McCluskey" <pcm@rahul.net> writes:
> 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.
His illustration seems to have corners though; that structure looks
rollable to me. It seems a bit like the pillow-case problem: how large
volume can you get by blowing up a flexible (but non-elastic) square
pillow-case? Of course, in this context the important thing is just to
make it possible to roll up the casing enough so that you can keep
three assemblers and two casings inside an extended casing.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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