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In what order should a printer-replicating shop learn its process capabilities?

research/selfrep-capsequence

In what order a printer-replicating shop should learn its process capabilities (stylised, assumed efforts): the exact best order over all 362,880 beats walking the budget frontier (54 to 73% of the optimum over 24 weeks); a gain-per-week bundle rule comes within 0 to 6%.

6 tests

What it found

A stylised, preliminary follow-up to selfrep-capability: a shop learns capabilities one at a time, so the choice is an order, scored by closure-weeks (closure held while still learning). With the assumed efforts, all 9! orders are covered exactly. The best order differs from walking the budget frontier, which scores only 54–73% of the optimum over 24 weeks; a gain-per-week bundle rule is within 0–6%, a one-capability-at-a-time rule 69–80%. The optimal order is moderately fragile to the efforts (within 1% of the optimum in 39–88% of draws scaled 0.5×–2×). Efforts and the capability map are assumptions; nothing was built.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/selfrep-capsequence: closure_by_week
selfrep-capsequence/experiments/closure_by_week.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.