
American mathematician and computer machine developer Norbert Wiener and one of his cybernetics machines.

American mathematician and computer machine developer Norbert Wiener and one of his cybernetics machines.

In terminology, machine is a constructed thin, whether material or immaterial, typically an assemblage of parts that transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. [1]

Animation | Alive puzzle
The notoriously baffling query about what defines life or alive in the framework of general animated bodies in the universe, animate machines in question here, dates typically to Rene Descartes’ famous query about how to distinguish an automaton from a human, about which he concluded the automaton could never “react” like a human, e.g. to verbal questions, hence not alive—or something along these lines.

The following is Norbert Wiener’s similar 1950 query about machines and aliveness: [2]

“Certain analogies of behavior are observed between the machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic … if we use the word ‘life’ to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of entropy, we are at liberty to do so; however, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena … it is my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘vitalism’, and the like, and say merely that machines [and] human beings [are] pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase.”

The animation-alive puzzle, was solved in 2009 by American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims via the defunct theory of life and life terminology upgrades.

References
1. Machine – Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 2000.
2. Wiener, Norbert. (1950). The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (§2: Progress and Entropy, pgs. 28-47). Houghton Mifflin Co.

External links
● Machine – Wikipedia.