Month: September 2022

PREREQUISITES OF COMPLEXITY. "Finally, the number of variants (mutants) with non-zero fitness (sometimes called the neutral fraction of mutants) should be sizable. It has been shown that ideally between 10%-40% of all mutations experienced by a population need to be neutral to ensure evolvability. (Note that the fraction of mutants of biological proteins is also in that range.)" https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

ENHANCED GENE HUNTING. "Neutrality enables the organism to better sample the pool of available mutations by being able to discover beneficial mutants without constantly being penalized by the already high frequency of deleterious mutations. Beneficial mutations are hard to come by in a single try, but can become more likely if interspersed by a series of neutral ones. In essence, neutral mutations allow organisms to buy more time in their quest for discovering survivability-enhancing traits." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER. "It is easy to see why mutating binary code would make it rather impossible to discover new functionality: the fraction of neutral changes is just too low. On the contrary, integration of pieces of functional code and/or importing functions and APIs available in the computer environment have a much higher probability of being neutral, and very rarely even beneficial." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

RANDOM MUTATED CODE. "A limited number of random mutation of computer viruses have been recorded, caused by data corruption in transit, or by a failure of system memory or disks. One example is the single byte modification in the 1704 strain of the IBM Cascade virus, detected in Yugoslavia. This has been attributed to random corruption rather than to deliberate modification. Some newer viruses incorporate self-correcting codes to avoid such in-transit corruption." https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

COLD COMFORT. “The probability of extensive random corruption of a block of 1000 bits generating an exact match against the 1000 bit test virus is 1/2(1000) or ~10(-301)." Perhaps, however, this is not the right question. https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

FORECASTING OBLIVION. "A single computer randomly generating 1000 bit patterns...would generate a new operational virus...once every 10(+249) years. Even with the expansion of the computer base worldwide it seems highly unlikely that such a random mutation would generate a new computer virus." This is far from convincing. https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

MORE LIKELY OUTCOME. "The probability of an existing computer virus mutating by random bit corruption into another viable virus is considerably higher." https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

MORE PROBABLE PREDICTION. "In the future viral computer viruses may have all the dangerous capabilities in a virtual life in cyberspace that are well known from our biological life." https://lnkd.in/dz3C6n5 View in LinkedIn

FITNESS SELECTION. "Researchers pitted self-replicating computer programs against computer viruses in the domain of the Avida platform for digital evolution. The co-evolution of host and virus ultimately led to organisms with capabilities superior to those of organisms that evolved without battling the viruses." https://lnkd.in/dkJprEM View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE deals with the extraordinary asymmetry issues of flatfish. These are the most asymmetric vertebrates that have ever lived. This lifestyle imposes enormous developmental challenges on their bodies, because they arose from symmetrical vertically oriented fishes and had to torque their bodies to an asymmetric horizontal venue, by moving eyes and organs in their early adulthood. Such Herculean efforts stand out, at the very least, as somewhat bizarre. View in LinkedIn