that carries part of the machine code used to fabricate its own body.
Seems like just a clickbait headline. It could easily contain all of the gcode for printing the book itself and not the part for printing the letters on the page.
But it might be possible to have gcode that (completely) prints its own gcode. Regular programming languages can do that, there’s a whole fun community around cool puzzles that use that. Obviously, this project does not do that.
How is that possible? Adding the gcode would change the gcode.
It’s called a Quine
Hers my favorite example, it’s 128 languages in a Quine relay https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
Seems like just a clickbait headline. It could easily contain all of the gcode for printing the book itself and not the part for printing the letters on the page.
But it might be possible to have gcode that (completely) prints its own gcode. Regular programming languages can do that, there’s a whole fun community around cool puzzles that use that. Obviously, this project does not do that.