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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

SHARING GENES. "Even complete functionality might be snatched from another clean program, or another virus as well. As previously predicted, a cooperation protocol can enhance sharing of features between malicious executables as well. Code snatching is a tried and true function of almost all biological organisms." 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

HYBRID CODE. "It is conceivable that an evolutionary function in the malware could snatch clean or malicious code from other programs. It could integrate code from other programs by identifying function prolog and epilog code." 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

BREEDING MALWARE. "A threat might be able to snatch code from another program in its environment. We have seen examples of a virus like Pinfi jumping on top of worms to replicate in new environments as a combination threat. Security products do not always recognize the worm once it is infected with a virus, and the combination helps the survival of both threats." 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

MOSTLY HARMLESS. "It is clear that the emergence of an evolvable threat could be potentially disastrous. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that evolution will in most cases lead to harmless forms of a threat, as is often observed in biology." Cold comfort for the small percentage of disastrous threats. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

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

PREREQUISITES OF COMPLEXITY IN ARTIFICIAL LIFE. "First and foremost are of course the three conditions for Darwinian evolution themselves: replication, variation and selection. Of those, replication and selection are naturally present, and we argued above that variation can occur via a variety of mechanisms. However, in order for sufficient variation to be present so that selection can act efficiently, population sizes should be large." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn