Month: September 2022

OLD VIEW. "Our study of computer viruses at first suggests they are close to what we might define as “artificial life.” However, upon closer examination, a number of significant deficiencies can be found. These lead us to conclude that computer viruses are not “alive,” nor is it possible to refine them so as to make them “alive” without drastically altering our definition of “life.” There is no acceptable definition of life. https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS CONTINUUM. "This continuity makes the conceptualization of life a very difficult task, since it should exist “half-living” or “quite-living” systems." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

NOT ABSOLUTE. “Life is not an absolute quality which suddenly appeared, it gradually emerged at the beginning of the evolution. [...] there is no clear boundary line.” (Cairns-Smith, 1990). https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

SOME MORE THAN OTHERS. “It seems more appropriate to consider life as a continuum property of organizational patterns, with some more or less alive than others.” (Farmer & Belin, 1992). https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

INDEFINITE. “Presumably, life emerged in a gradual, long-term process whereby primitive proto-organisms were created in the teeming, primal soup of the seas. Life is still not completed; it is a partly indefinite phenomenon of becoming, not a completely determined state of being.” (Emmeche, 1994). https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

LARGE AND BLURRING BORDERLINE. "The fact that all the dominant modern theories consider that life progressively emerged from some kind of proto-organisms, strongly grounds the hypothesis of the existence of a large and blurring borderline between living and non-living, were the inert progressively fades into the living." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC LIFE. "Computer viruses are autonomous self-reproducing agents. They infect other computers just like viruses and parasites in the biological world do. Computer viruses are a form of artificial life." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. "Mark Ludwig claims computer viruses are the only artificial life forms in the wild of which one can claim that their environments (operating systems) are not specially constructed to let them work. He finds that computer viruses can exhibit Darwinian evolution." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

NOT CHILDREN OF THEIR PARENTS. "Ludwig argues that computer viruses, unlike such other forms of artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or genetic programming, are the only form of artificial life not biased by the hope of their creators." (Author of The Giant Black Book of Computer Viruses). https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

TABULAR RAZA. "Because computer viruses must exist in an environment (DOS in particular) that was designed without any thought of the digital organisms that might come to inhabit it, they are free from any accusation that the environment's "physics" were written to support the emergence of their lifelike behavior." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn