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Re:Our closest worm kin regrow body parts, raising hopes of ... by kazinator on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @11:54PM (#13068581)
Microchips grow autonomously if you regard the entire fab and its staff as a big organism.

And note that the blueprints for the chip do actually encode more or less what it looks like: as a genotype they resemble the phenotype. Yet such a repair is not feasible.

DNA genes do not encode an arm or a leg directly, but a convoluted process by which the structure develops.

Re:Our closest worm kin regrow body parts, raising hopes of ... by guitarbill on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @01:27AM (#13068885)
> Yet such a repair is not feasible.

Well, we don't really know, because we've never bothered to build a chip/fab process with that capability. It's cheaper to just throw broken ones away (edit: plus, it isn't morally reprehensible to throw them away because they don't have consciousness... yet). I guess the other thing is that a CPU is pretty simplistic compared to a big organism.

We do bin products and then e.g. underclock or disable parts of them accordingly. So there's the start of an "injury"-sensing mechanism. But microchips still have a few thousand years to go in their "evolution" at least :)