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CURATED CODE. "The only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL MINIMAL CELL EQUIVALENT. "He organised a contest to write the smallest possible functional self-replicating computer virus and concluded there is an absolute minimum size. He concludes from the minimum size that random processes inside a computer cannot create the smallest virus; even then such a virus could be an evolutionary dead end." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

GODLESS FERAL COMMUNITIES. "Or to put it more bluntly, feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and quite unscientifically) build God into the system." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

TABULAR RAZA. "Because computer viruses must exist in an environment (DOS in particular) that was designed without any thought of the digital organisms that might come to inhabit it, they are free from any accusation that the environment's "physics" were written to support the emergence of their lifelike behavior." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

ANALOGY WITH LIFE IS CLOSER. "What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous." (George Dyson). https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

NOT CHILDREN OF THEIR PARENTS. "Ludwig argues that computer viruses, unlike such other forms of artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or genetic programming, are the only form of artificial life not biased by the hope of their creators." (Author of The Giant Black Book of Computer Viruses). https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

THE DIGITAL AGE OF BIOLOGY. "This is now the era of digital biology, in which the proteins and other interacting molecules in a cell can be viewed as its hardware and the information encoded in its DNA as its software." (Craig Venter). https://lnkd.in/eyZU783 View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN EVOLUTION. "Mark Ludwig claims computer viruses are the only artificial life forms in the wild of which one can claim that their environments (operating systems) are not specially constructed to let them work. He finds that computer viruses can exhibit Darwinian evolution." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn

DNA AS SOFTWARE. "DNA is the software of the cell, and when we change the software we change the species." (J Craig Venter). https://lnkd.in/eJFrT_P View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC LIFE. "Computer viruses are autonomous self-reproducing agents. They infect other computers just like viruses and parasites in the biological world do. Computer viruses are a form of artificial life." https://lnkd.in/dbB7hd4 View in LinkedIn