Tiny 'Living' Robots Figured Out How to Reproduce - Gizmodo

The team observed the xenobots, which are made from around 3,000 stem cells each, moving around a petri dish to collect stray stem cells and form them into clumps.

Eventually, when enough stem cells were collected, those clumps became new xenobots.

Bongard told CNN that while the behavior as initially observed was rare and situation-specific, the team used the supercomputer to test billions of body shapes to determine the ideal form for the collection; it ended up spitting out something that looked a lot like Pac-Man.

Just like Pac-Man’s form is ideal for gobbling ghosts, the C-shaped xenobots were much more effective at catching clumps of stem cells and forming new xenobots.

Bongard told Gizmodo in an email that frog cells were used because it is one of the most common organisms used in biological studies.

“In our first experiment from January 2020, we included frog heart muscle tissue into the xenobots and showed that could shuffle, slowly, across the bottom of a Petri dish,” Bongard told Gizmodo.

Kinematic replication has been known to occur at the molecular level, but Bongard told Gizmodo it was never observed or believed to occur in organisms.

According to the study, researchers verified that the xenobots, not “fluid dynamics and self-assembly,” were responsible for the replication after observing that the stem cells weren’t spontaneously combining in the xenobots’ absence.

There’s really no telling what future xenobots might be used for, Bongard said