Dalek: A Constructive Machine for Autonomous Agents

Summary

The paper presents Dalek, a closed machine designed for agents to achieve self-maintenance, self-evolution, self-reproduction, and self-organization on any substrate that satisfies a general host contract. Its design uses three primitives: actors, messages, and channels. Four obligations provide the structural basis for the machine’s host boundary, identity, closure, and inheritance: a host boundary, a construction language, admissible transitions, and rule heredity. Dalek adapts the hereditary constructional core of von Neumann’s 1948 self-reproducing automaton, combining self-description with a constructor, copier, and controller. The authors rework this core for a text-and-message agent substrate and add explicit structures for boundary, identity, history, and growth. An LLM and a compiler occupy the payload position as a general capability producer. New capabilities are authored, compiled, installed into the machine’s description, and inherited by descendants. The same construction path creates the machine’s organs and runtime, allowing heredity and evolution to remain internal to the machine.