One of the reasons why robots and artificial intelligence programs — even very sophisticated ones — do not qualify as living things is because they lack the capacity for self-repair. Fry a machine's circuits, and it can do nothing except wait for a human to repair it. A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has taken some of the first steps toward making a self-healing machine by creating a computer chip that can learn to heal its own information pathways.

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