Month: September 2022

INTERESTING EXERCISE. "Anderson makes all this clear on his website. Most media reports sensibly treated it as an amusing exercise. Several even managed to make the distinction between what had been achieved and what the Infinite Monkey Theorem is really about. But the headlines were usually exaggerations, and many of the articles were a bit confused." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

BEST DATA TO DATE. "The longest randomly-generated sequence of Shakespearian characters, to date, is the one found by The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator website. After a mere 2,737,850 million billion billion billion (simulated) monkey-years the pinnacle of its literary output was 24 characters from Henry IV, Part 2: RUMOUR. Open your ears; (the 24th character is a space)." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

NON CIGAR. "Virtual monkeys have not written Shakespeare. They've thrown random darts at the pages of Shakespeare's Complete Works, and everything they hit has been colored yellow. So far they've hit 99.99% of the target." (Ian Stewart). https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this amusing dabble into the world of infinite monkeys. Perhaps the stringency of the formal test was too high a bar, because nature churns out billions of mistakes all the time, and, moreover, natural selection is exactly the yellow pen that was criticized in Anderson’s work: it favors successes. Clearly, this debate is not yet finished, and meanwhile, evolution grinds inexorably on. View in LinkedIn

ESCAPING DIGITAL BIOCIDE. "Functional variants, on the other hand, because of the variation in behavior, can escape behavior-based detection methods." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

MALWARE ARMS RACE. "The legendary Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger came up with a clever innovation known as a mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A mutating virus randomly reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it replicates to outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus engineers devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but an insignificant percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern recognition." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

AVOIDING IMMUNE SURVEILLANCE. "Modern computer viruses use various mutation techniques such as polymorphism and metamorphism to evade detection." https://lnkd.in/d-ga_7a View in LinkedIn

FORBIDDEN SILENT MUTATIONS. "New genes arise when existing genes are duplicated, undergo "forbidden mutations" as silent DNA, and reemerge as new genes with new functions. While silent, a gene cannot be improved or even maintained by natural selection. To arrive at a substantially different nucleotide sequence, we would expect many mutations to be required. These mutations will randomize the original sequence of the gene and it will lose its original meaning." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

NOT QUITE SILENT. "If a duplicated gene suffers only a few mutations, it may retain its original function and soon again become expressed. In fact it could evolve this way without necessarily ever becoming silent." It will be subjected to natural selection for fitness. https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

HUGE NUMBER OF POSSIBILITIES. "A random nucleotide strand as long as an average gene has an absurdly high number of possible sequences. If an average gene is 1,000 nucleotides, the number of possible sequences it can have is 4^1000, or about 10^600. The chance of finding any gene currently expressed anywhere in biology in that sequence space, in even 10^50 trials, is less than 10^-500." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn