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GENERATIVE ROOT. "A program that copies itself can generally be written extremely succinctly. In English, such a program might be: "Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes. ‘‘Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes.’’ https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

EXPONENTIAL SMARTS. "Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what's called "recursive self-improvement." As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

GÖDEL'S NUMBERS. "Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, describes certain aspects of the “universal machine”:"…underneath here lay the same powerful idea that Gödel had used, that there was no essential distinction between “numbers” and operations on numbers. From a modern mathematical point of view, they were all alike symbols. With this done, it followed that one particular machine could simulate the work done by any machine." https://lnkd.in/dCVHq5S View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSAL MACHINE. "Since the description of the machine can itself be expressed as a sequence of symbols, Turing went on to describe a universal machine which can read the description of any specific machine and then carry out the computation it describes." https://lnkd.in/d854b7f View in LinkedIn

ESCHER'S DRAWING HAND. "The idea of programs that write programs is inherent in the concept of the universal Turing machine, set forth by Alan M. Turing in 1936. He showed that any computation can be described in terms of a machine shifting among a finite number of states in response to a sequence of symbols read and written one at a time on a potentially infinite tape." https://lnkd.in/d854b7f View in LinkedIn

SHOWN VERSUS ACTUAL CODE. "Self modifying code is a phrase used to describe programs that are able to change themselves. Using self modifying code can make it harder to reverse engineer a program, largely because the ‘actual code may differ from that shown’. That is, the actual code that ends up executing may be different from the code that is first shown during disassembly." https://lnkd.in/dU6pj5j View in LinkedIn

LATERAL GENOMICS. "The wide spread of gene exchange and loss in the prokaryotic world has prompted the concept of ‘lateral genomics’ to the point of an outright denial of the relevance of phylogenetic trees for evolution." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

MORE EFFICIENT. "Code that's capable of altering its own instructions while it's still executing has been around for a while. Typically, it's done to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance, or to simply reduce repetitively similar code. But for all intents and purposes, there are no self-aware, self-improving AI systems today." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend contemplates lateral or horizontal gene transfer. This has been a fly in the ointment for traditional Mendelian genetics. Along with the idea of engulfment of entire organisms in an extreme form of symbiosis that separately gave rise to the mitochondria and the chloroplast, horizontal gene transfer has significantly mucked up tidy vertical inheritance trees. View in LinkedIn

VALUABLE TOOL. "Self-modifying code is a piece of software which achieves its goal by rewriting itself as it goes along. It is almost universally Considered Harmful now, but it used to be a neat trick in the toolbox of programmers of small or old computers." https://lnkd.in/dknBRJD View in LinkedIn