Artificial cell division.

After a survey of the theory and some realizations of self-replicating machines, this paper presents a novel self-replicating loop endowed with universal construction and computation properties. Based on the hardware implementation of the so-called Tom Thumb algorithm, the design of this loop leads to a new kind of cellular automaton made of a processing and a control units. The self-replication of the Swiss flag serves as an artificial cell division example of the loop which, according to autopoietic evaluation criteria, corresponds to a cell showing the phenomenology of a living system.