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CRITIQUE. Ian Stewart: "His calculations suggest it would take far, far longer than the age of the Universe for monkeys to completely randomly produce a flawless copy of the 3,695,990 or so characters in the works. "Along the way there would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on." he said. "Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear (countless times) before Shakespeare did." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

RARE CODING SEQUENCES. "This situation would make the genetic code different from other codes such as computer code or written text. In these codes, the ratio of meaningful to meaningless sequences (of information content similar to that of an average gene — 1,000 nucleotides = 2,000 bits = 250 bytes) in random sequence space is so low that the chance of finding a meaningful one in only 10^5 or 10^10 or even 10^25 trials is effectively zero. Perhaps the genetic code is so different, but this difference has not been demonstrated." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

PROF STEWART'S ANALYSIS: Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He has offered one of the few critiques of the work. https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

CODING: NONCODING GENE RATIO. "If the proportion of functional gene-length strands of DNA to nonfunctional ones is not as low as we actually find in nature — (10^12 different genes) x (10^25 estimated average number of functional alleles each) / (10^600 possible sequences) = 10^-563 conservatively — but is as high as 10^-10, say, this situation would lead to something like a "many worlds" theory of evolution." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

GIANT STEP. "The monkeys accomplished their goal of recreating all 38 works of Shakespeare. The last work, The Taming Of The Shrew, was completed at 2 AM PST on October 6, 2011. This is the first time every work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. Furthermore, this is the largest work ever randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere." https://lnkd.in/djJFZTk View in LinkedIn

CODE NATURAL SELECTION. "Those features that provide the virus with an evolutionary advantage (e.g., escaping detection, infecting different platforms, etc.) will be propagated, leading to unanticipated complex behaviors." The survival of the fittest code, in Darwinian terms. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

LARGE CODE SOURCE. "As in biology, the collection of software and APIs in an operating system environment is sufficient for providing a pool of features that a virus can choose to sample." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

THE LEAPING ACCUMULATION OF SMALLS. "The myriad examples...of unintended virus behaviors due to random changes are all examples of more complex behaviors originating from simpler ones through small programming jumps." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. "We can imagine the emergence of arbitrary complexity in autonomously evolving computer viruses." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

IS SMALL SUFFICIENT? "The question that arises from these examples is whether small malware code changes—even if collected under a single malware implementation—are sufficient for the evolution of the functional complexity exhibited by biological viruses." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn