One of the grand challenges in artificial life is to create an
artificial system that demonstrates self-replication and evolution
in the real physical world. This question was
obviously initiated by von Neumann's
seminal work
on the self-replicating and evolving automaton that was presented
more than five decades ago. Unlike
his well known idea of universal computer, however, von Neumann's
universal constructor has never been subject to physical
implementation. This is mainly due to the
fragility of its mechanisms against perturbations that are
unavoidable in more realistic kinematic settings. In this brief
concept paper, I present a simple, but substantial, I believe, idea
of enhancing the robustness of the self-replication processes, by
introducing an additional subsystem that constructs a ``workplace''
prior to automaton construction. Workplaces
are
assumed to be solid structures that can be easily assembled under
perturbations and can rigidly hold other components during the
automaton construction processes. Similar kind of strategies are
found to be prevalent in biological organisms, suggesting the
effectiveness of the presented idea for the realization of kinematic
models of self-replication
and
evolution
.