Having begun by selling 3-D printers as self-assembly kits, MakerBot introduced the Replicator 2 in September as a ready-made desktop machine priced at $2,199, about €1,650, with which people can produce objects of their own design.
By introducing interacting replicators, the problem of information integration is taken from the quasispecies level to the ecosystem level.
The study was later extended, e.g., by introducing random mutation of interaction strength in various replicator networks [ 7] or by introducing random growth in replicator networks [ 8, 9].
Although many studies of replicators, dating at least back to Eigen's work in the 1970s, have used related techniques, this paper goes beyond them by introducing strand specificity into the model and by explicitly incorporating spatial considerations such as diffusion using a cellular automata framework.
As pervasive as this terminology has been, it engendered very little controversy until Richard Dawkins introduced the distinction between replicators and vehicles in his The Selfish Gene (1976).
Dawkins introduced the general notions of replicator and vehicle so that selection need not be limited exclusively to gene-based biological evolution.
This is why Szathmáry [ 16] has introduced the term ' holistic (processive) replicator' to denote primarily non-modular autocatalytic cycle intermediates.
He also introduced the term "vehicle" for those entities produced by replicators that help these replicators increase in numbers by interacting effectively with their environments.
Szathmáry and Maynard Smith [[ 17], p. 201] have introduced the terms 'unlimited' and 'limited' heredity as attributes of replicators: 'Limited hereditary replicators, owing to their structural peculiarities, can exist and be replicated in only a few stable states, whereas unlimited hereditary replicators can encode for a practically infinite set of varieties'.
Dawkins also introduced the term "vehicle", which he defines as "any relatively discrete entity…which houses replicators, and which can be regarded as a machine programmed to preserve and propagate the replicators that ride inside it" (1982b, p. 295).
