Replicator vs Imitator - What's the difference?
replicator | imitator |
Something capable of self-replication, like a gene or meme.
* {{quote-book, author=Richard Dawkins, year=1976, title=The Selfish Gene,
passage=We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators .}}
A (fictional) technical device that replicates physical objects.
* 2001 Greg Cox The Eugenics Wars Vol I: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Star Trek) , Star Trek, ISBN 978-0671021276, page 76
* 2001 Judith Barad, Ed Robertson The Ethics of Star Trek , Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0060933265, page 74
* 2007 Douglas Hofstadter I Am a Strange Loop , Basic Books, ISBN 978-0465030781, pages 301-302
As nouns the difference between replicator and imitator
is that replicator is something capable of self-replication, like a gene or meme while imitator is one who imitates or apes another.replicator
English
(wikipedia replicator)Noun
(en noun)- Why, this planet was still centuries away from developing such necessities as personal replicators or portable nano-intelligences...
- either there is not such thing as a concept known as 'spacecraft' (inwhich case, any talk of spacecraft, warp drives, inertial dampers, replicators , and the like would be pointless), or indeed there is.
- The scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all of my cells. It will the transmit this information by radio. Travelling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will then create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine. It will be in this body that I shall wake up.