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LIFE AS CONTINUUM. "This continuity makes the conceptualization of life a very difficult task, since it should exist “half-living” or “quite-living” systems." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY FROM SIMPLICITY. "The mathematician John Conway has put theory into practice when he created the Game of Life in 1970. The huge interest for this game derives from its incredible power to create very complex objects from ridiculously simple rules and especially to the visual displays that are much more meaningful for us than dry equations, of course." https://lnkd.in/d3B2FKW View in LinkedIn

OLD VIEW. "Our study of computer viruses at first suggests they are close to what we might define as “artificial life.” However, upon closer examination, a number of significant deficiencies can be found. These lead us to conclude that computer viruses are not “alive,” nor is it possible to refine them so as to make them “alive” without drastically altering our definition of “life.” There is no acceptable definition of life. https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

PREDATION. "Some viruses also exhibit predatory behavior. For instance, the DenZuk virus will seek out and overwrite instances of the Brain virus if both are present on the same system. Other viruses exhibit territorial behavior — marking their infected domain so that others of the same type will not enter and compete with the original infection. Some viruses also exhibit self-protective behavior, including camouflage techniques." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

SPECIATION. "Computer viruses exhibit “species” with well-defined ecological niches based on host machine type, and variations within these species. These species are adapted to specific environments and will not survive if moved to a different environment." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

GENETIC INHERITANCE. "Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a strain of polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few mutants that escape discovery by heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to their offspring?" https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

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