Category: Uncategorized

DEEMED UNLIKELY (TODAY). "Spafford performed an exhaustive review of computer viruses under the Artificial Life perspective confirming the absence of functional evolution in such programs. Although the possibility of an autonomously evolving virus—as the one discussed here—was mentioned, it was quickly dismissed as a task too daunting requiring a very large implementation, possibly larger than the OS itself." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

PROGRAMMED MUTATION. "Somatic hypermutation involves a programmed process of mutation affecting the variable regions of immunoglobulin genes. Unlike germline mutation, SHM affects only an organism's individual immune cells, and the mutations are not transmitted to the organism's offspring." https://lnkd.in/dZFtBek View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS MALWARE. "Alife systems also differ in that they implement simulated environments where specific program behaviors are rewarded. While this setting is very different from the standard computer malware paradigm, computer virus researchers hinted at the idea of autonomously evolving malware already in the early 1990s." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

FRAGILE DIGITAL CODE. "In these systems, the code is implemented with small, well-defined instruction sets that are highly evolvable, that is, the probability that a mutation leads to another functional program is high (of the order of several to tens of percents). Most standard computer languages are not robust in this manner. For example, the x86 instruction set only tolerates very few mutations (on the order of fractions of a percent of the code." That applies to today. Not tomorrow. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN MALWARE. "More recent systems such as the Avida platform have established that Darwinian evolution of computer programs can be used to study evolutionary biology and genetics." Imagine if this was available to malware. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

MILLION VIRTUAL MONKEYS. "Just two years ago, Jesse Anderson used Amazon's cloud computing resources to create a virtual monkey army that quickly and randomly assembled works of the Bard. (Anderson has a nice visualization on his website of the way the words emerged in Shakespeare's poem "A Lover's Complaint.")." https://lnkd.in/dmvcR5f View in LinkedIn

"THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times." https://lnkd.in/dGAedTt View in LinkedIn

HARD CHOICE. "The infinite monkey theorem is a bar in Austin, but it is also a very cool mathematical theorem that deals with very big numbers." https://lnkd.in/dnbrNQ5 View in LinkedIn

LAUGHINGLY IMPROBABLE. "The combinatorial stringing together of all of the steps between LECA and Macropus rufus (the red kangaroo), Trichomonas vaginalis, or Mozart is, indeed, laughably improbable. Surely, if life’s tape was rewound, none of these would recur." (LECA = Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor). https://lnkd.in/d6GwkCt View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE this weekend alone deals with the humorous but deadly serious Infinite Monkey Theorem. You know the one: given an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, and infinite time, could they write (by accident) the works of the Bard? Nice image, with a stochastic heart. Rather like Fred Hoyle’s question of the improbability that whirlwind in a Boeing plane junkyard is able to assemble a new plane. View in LinkedIn