Which share of a bracket family can each shop process make, and which machine should a shop add next?

What it found

Using the assumed rules of simdesign-dfm (FDM, CNC routing, laser cutting, casting) as feasibility checks on 20 000 sampled bracket feature sets, geometry alone gives a degenerate answer: FDM covers 89% and no other process covers anything FDM cannot, so no machine adds coverage (a negative result). With a tip-load requirement of 1–1000 N and closed-form beam checks the processes separate: FDM alone covers 30%, adding casting and a laser cutter 41%, and the best next machine depends on the budget and on the part sizes. Greedy selection from selfrep-nextmachine is sometimes 1–2 coverage points below exhaustive search. Stylised: all rule values, working stresses and prices are assumed, the beam check ignores fillet stress concentration, and nothing was made.

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Simulation-first design

• Does a mesh-aware stress margin change what manufacturing rules cost a sized bracket?Re-runs simdesign-dfm with a stress knock-down and a finer search mesh, checking designs at h = 0.7 mm: the price ordering (casting ~1.4, CNC ~1.23, FDM 1.0) survives the mesh, the laser-cutting price does not (1.01–1.22, noisy), and a 1.3 margin leaves designs at 0.88–1.02 of the limit (stylised, assumed rule values).
• Does a patch-averaged stress converge under mesh refinement where the peak element stress does not?Compares peak and patch-averaged von Mises stress under mesh refinement on the L-bracket: the peak rises 18–41% from h = 2.5 to 0.55 mm while a 3 mm patch average moves 1–6%, but it reads only 0.45–0.69 of the peak so needs its own limit (stylised, assumed values).
• Does a patch-averaged stress change what manufacturing rules cost a sized bracket?Repeats the process-rule bracket search with a 3 mm patch-averaged stress instead of the peak: the ordering of mass prices (casting > CNC > laser ≈ FDM) holds, the laser price spread across seeds shrinks from 0.16 to under 0.005, and designs overshoot their limit by 2–12% on a fine mesh against 19–34% for the peak (stylised, assumed values, uncalibrated limit).
• Is the shrinking laser-cutting price scatter under the patch stress caused by the near-sharp fillet floor?Tests whether a near-sharp fillet floor explains the laser-cutting price scatter seen in simdesign-patchsearch: it does not (peak-stress designs already use 7.6–14.3 mm fillets, so floors of 0.2 and 1 mm give identical designs); the patch-stress price is steady (sd 0.006–0.011) at every floor, and the cause of the peak scatter is not identified (negative, five seeds, stylised).
• Where does the peak-stress price scatter of laser-cutting rules come from?Follow-up to simdesign-filletfloor: the peak-stress price scatter of laser-cutting rules (sd 0.063) sits in the 2 mm gauge sub-search, not the fillet floor; a four-times search budget cuts it to 0.025 but not monotonically, so several nearby optima are plausible but not shown (five seeds, stylised).
• Does a patch-averaged stress give a mesh-converged stress concentration for a bolt hole?Patch-averaged stress for a bolt hole in a tension strip: nearly settled under mesh refinement already, matches Kirsch's disc averages, needs its own limit (stylised).

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

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.