FW: Would Jeffrey like to meet Saul Griffith in NYC next week?

Hi, Lesley,

 My colleague and the brilliant scientist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur Saul Griffith is coming to NYC Monday 9-24 for a few days. I think Jeffrey would enjoy meeting Saul -- for up to one hour.

Background:
In April 2006 at the island near St. Thomas, I described to Jeffrey Dr. Griffith's work at MIT's Media Lab on self-replicating robots; the book and website Howtoons for inspiring kids to be engineers; and his work to launch a for-profit company to make eyeglasses more affordable in middle income and poor countries (which is where I work as President). In addition, Dr. Griffith is President of Makani Power, a stealth venture about which there is little public information available at this time.  A CV from May 2006 is attached.

Logistics:
If Jeffrey is interested, please contact Dr. Griffith's assistant, Jamie Ross, at jross@makanipower.com
 or 510.629.4316 (during Pacific time business hours).



Best,
David

PS 1.
Dr. Griffith's PhD Thesis abstract:
Abstract
Biological systems are replete with examples of high complexity structures that have “self
assembled,” or more accurately, programmatically assembled from many smaller, simpler
components. By comparison, the fabrication systems engineered by humans are typically top down,
or subtractive, processes where systems of limited complexity are carved from bulk materials. Selfassembly
to date has resembled crystallization more than it has the programmatic assembly of
complex or useful structures – these systems are information limited. This thesis explores the
programming of self-assembling systems by the introduction of small amounts of state to the subunits
of the assembly.
A six-state, kinematic, conformational latching component is presented that is capable of selfreplicating
bit strings of two shape differentiated versions of the same component where the two
variants represent the 0 and 1 bits. Individual units do not assemble until a string is introduced to the
assembly environment to be copied.
Electro-mechanical state machine emulators were constructed. Operating on an air table, the
units demonstrated logic limited aggregation, or error-preventing assembly, as well as autonomous
self-replication of bit strings.
A new construction was developed that demonstrates that any two dimensional shape
composed of square pixels can be deterministically folded from a linear string of vertex-connected
square tiles. This non-intersecting series of folds implies a ‘resolution’ limit of four tiles per pixel. It
is shown that four types of tiles, patterned magnetically, is sufficient to construct any shape given
sequential folding. The construction was implemented to fold the letters ‘M I T’ from sequences of
the 4 tile types.
An analogous construction is developed in three dimensions. It is similarly shown that rightangled
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 suggests a
concept of 3D completeness.
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.