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DIGITAL BIOCIDE. "In the event that a behavioral signature is developed for the virus, the entire population, including the cryptic variants, is affected equally. In this case, the functional/behavioral uniformity of the virus population would force all of it to extinction by the countermeasure." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

PRIOR FAILURES. "Earlier experiments have shown how difficult the task is. Wikipedia mentions a 2003 project that used computer programs to simulate a lot of monkeys randomly typing. After the equivalent of billions and billions and billions of monkey years the simulated apes had only produced part of a line from Henry IV, Part 2." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

MALWARE INHERITABLE CHANGES. "While there are examples of functional variation that have occurred by chance (reviewed below in support of our hypothesis) there are no examples of computer malware that exhibits intentional functional change between generations. In the absence of functional variation, differential fitness will never be realized in computer viruses since the reproductive success of offspring remains unchanged." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

THE SMALL PRINT. "If he's running an evolutionary approach, holding on to successful guesses, then he'll get there," said Tim Harford, popular science writer and presenter of the BBC's radio show about numbers More or Less. And without those constraints? "Not a chance," said Dr Ian Stewart, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

MORE NEEDED. "Signature obfuscation, or as we will refer to it here as “cryptic variation”, will not allow for the discovery of new functionality. What true Darwinian evolution can accomplish is vastly different, because it is the process responsible for the de novo generation of all of the complexity of life." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c 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

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

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

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

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