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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Growing machines

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

construction is developed in three dimensions. It is similarly shown that right-angled tetrahedrons, when folded from an edge-connected string, can generate any three dimensional structure where the primitive pixel (or voxel) is a rhombic hexahedron. This construction also suggests a concept of 3D completeness for assembly, somewhat analogous to the concept of Turing completeness in computation. In combination, these pieces of work suggest that a manufacturing system based on four tiles, with seven states per tile, is capable of self-replication of arbitrary 3D structure by copying, then folding, bit strings of those tiles where the desired structure is encoded in the tile sequence.

Degree

thesis:*
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2004

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Griffith, Saul Thomas, 1974-
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Joseph Jacobson.

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
Language dc:language.iso
en_US

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28780
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28780

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Griffith, Saul Thomas, 1974-. Growing machines. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28780