Life Objects Research Articles

Digital Printing of Digital Materials

We present a printer that builds functional three-dimensional structures by reversible assembly of a discrete set of components, “digital materials”. This approach uses the components rather than a control system to impose the spatial and functional constraints. Printing can be performed as a parallel rather than a linear process. The printing process is reversible for re-use of the pieces or for error correction at any point in the object's life. Error detection, error-reduction and error-tolerance during assembly allows for reliable, high throughput printing. We are presenting development approaches to such a printing device.

Towards a meaning of life

LIFE is an experimental programming language proposing to integrate three orthogonal programming paradigms proven useful for symbolic computation. From the programmer's standpoint, it may be perceived as a language taking after logic programming, functional programming, and object-oriented programming. From a formal perspective, it may be seen as an instance (or rather, a composition of three instances) of a Constraint Logic Programming scheme due to Höhfeld and Smolka refining that of Jaffar and Lassez. We start with an informal overview demonstrating LIFE as a programming language, illustrating how its primitives offer rather unusual, and perhaps (pleasantly) startling, conveniences. The second part is a formal account of LIFE's object unification seen as constraint-solving over specific domains. We build on work by Smolka and Rounds to develop type-theoretic, logical, and algebraic renditions of a calculus or order-sorted feature approximations.

MICROSCOPY WITH INCIDENT LIGHT AND ITS APPLICATION TO LIVING OBJECTS

MICROSCOPY WITH INCIDENT LIGHT AND ITS APPLICATION TO LIVING OBJECTS