First, I love that this is from over 60 years ago. Here I am in the 21st century, happily thinking that genetic algorithms are relatively new techniques, and along come Von Neumann on HN, reminding me that, no, of course this is foolish, they are if not billions of years old, they are older than old, newer than new, infinitely permanent.<p>Second, more specifically, error correction is a natural extension of two techniques&#x2F;mandates:<p>a) The need for energy: A machine that is not provided plentiful energy will soon cease to operate as a machine unless it can gather it&#x27;s own, and graduate to organism status.<p>b) Reproduction: many copies have the opportunity to survive beyond catastrophic errors to a single organism (eg. lightning strikes) and reproduce with mutation to reduce effects of minor but still limiting errors (eg. cold-bloodedness).<p>Thanks for the link.