Month: September 2022

SOUNDS DARWINIAN. "You can make a virus plant itself in a program, but unless it knew what that program was doing and it's exact binary code structure, it's not going to be able to introduce anything beneficial to it. So you'd have to be extremely specialised and probably only work on one program, and probably only one version of that, and you couldn't just stick random "errors" in there - 99.99999% of the time you'll just break things, and the other 0.00001% of the time it won't do anything." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

THE CAVEAT. "That said, there have been worms/trojans designed to "infect" computers, find malware, delete it, and then delete themselves and move to other computers." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

GENETIC ALGORITHMS. "There are programs called "genetic algorithms" which intentionally self-mutate to try to tune themselves, though usually it's more about tweaking parameters than changing actual code." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

HOLD ONTO THIS ONE. "Bugs can arise in code which make them do potentially unintended but beneficial things." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTION IS THE GATE. "But programs do not self-replicate and there is no such thing as selection in a computer environment. You need all three (mutation, reproduction, selection) for evolution to occur." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

MACHINE LEARNING. "A whole industry, primarily around stock markets and statistical analysis, calls this Machine Learning, and they use algorithms which are designed to simulate analog signal processing, model neurons, or even simulate DNA and mutation over generations, to compute some result or another." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL MODEL. "There is great utility in algorithms modeled after biological processes. Google's Deep Dream is a neural net that was originally used to characterize pictures. Facebook uses such algorithms for face recognition. Lots of image and video processing use these algorithms. My late cousin used genetic algorithms in his Alzheimer's research. And, of course, many of these algorithms are used in video game AI." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

SELF-MODIFYING CODE. "In a programming language called Lisp, the source code to the program is data available to the program itself. It's pretty trivial in this environment to write self-modifying programs, and professional Lisp developers do this as a matter of course. Most of this self modification is bound within terms described by the programmer, but there's no reason a sufficiently sophisticated program couldn't have unbounded ability to self-modify." https://lnkd.in/evQuB2z View in LinkedIn

SOFT ERRORS. "In electronics and computing, a soft error is a type of error where a signal or datum is wrong. Errors may be caused by a defect, usually understood either to be a mistake in design or construction, or a broken component." https://lnkd.in/dhsszwF View in LinkedIn

COSMIC RAY ERRORS. "One experiment measured the soft error rate at the sea level to be 5,950 failures in time (FIT) per DRAM chip. When the same test setup was moved to an underground vault, shielded by over 50 feet (15 m) of rock that effectively eliminated all cosmic rays, zero soft errors were recorded. In this test, all other causes of soft errors are too small to be measured, compared to the error rate caused by cosmic rays." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error View in LinkedIn