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RAPID CHANGE IN 30 YEARS. "During the three decades of their existence, computer viruses have moved from simple replicators to advanced polymorphic and metamorphic implementations." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

RARE BENEFICIAL MUTATIONS. "It is important to note that the fraction of beneficial mutations (among all those that can occur) is usually very small, with most mutations being deleterious and the rest neutral." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE CONCEPT. "We argue here that apart from a hint and some failed implementation attempts (e.g., W32/Zellome), self-evolving malware has yet to appear. The concept itself, however, is relatively simple, and the consequences of the release of evolving malware should be studied." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

INHERITED GOOD MUTATIONS. "Mutations that provide organisms with a reproductive advantage over others (beneficial mutations) will tend to propagate to future generations." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

MALWARE MATINGS. "Malware has been spotted that evolves on its own, leeching onto other strains and multiplying its powers, without any human interaction." https://lnkd.in/dMWp2j5 View in LinkedIn

TUMOR MUTATIONS. "Our latest release (v70; Aug 2014) describes 2,002,811 coding point mutations in over one million tumor samples and across most human genes. COSMIC also details more than six million noncoding mutations, 10,534 gene fusions, 61,299 genome rearrangements, 695,504 abnormal copy number segments and 60,119,787 abnormal expression variants." https://lnkd.in/dcuS5W2 View in LinkedIn

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