I wonder if there is man-made machine that's capable of replicating itself from a sequence of instructions that sort of act like DNA. Turns out there is!

John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment.

This world runs on a cellular automaton system devised by von Neumann. The grid consists of cells where each can be in one of 29 states at any point in time. The state update is local to its environment. Similar to Conway's GoL.