Month: September 2022

COMPUTER VIRUSES occupy the same type of Grey Zone in programming that biological viruses occupy in biology. Both defy mainstream thinking, and both challenge definitions of life defined by autonomy, reproduction and evolution. And both inform each other considerably in relation to optional its and available strategies. View in LinkedIn

DEAD CODE. "In computer programming, dead code is a section in the source code of a program which is executed but whose result is never used in any other computation. While the result of a dead computation may never be used, it may raise exceptions or affect some global state, thus removal of such code may change the output of the program and introduce unintended bugs." https://lnkd.in/eXb6z-z View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL CONTAGIONS, a history. https://lnkd.in/ebfBn_S View in LinkedIn

PRIMORDIAL DIGITAL SOUP. "Someday the Net will be the summation of the world's total computing resources. All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected - indirectly or directly - to everything else." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." https://lnkd.in/epkJVpt View in LinkedIn

PRIMORDIAL NET. "This coming Net of distributed resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

NET AGENTS. "Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge on a controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the Net. Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital organisms - whatever they are called, there's an old fashion word for them: computer viruses." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

THOMAS S RAY featured heavily in the early days of synthetic life by creating Tierra, the pre-eminent synthetic life program. He is an ecological biologist who went into synthetic modeling and came out the other end "using the genome databases to study the origin and evolution of gene families." The following few quotes are from his work. https://lnkd.in/ehJiKXf View in LinkedIn

"SYNTHETIC LIFE should self-replicate, and evolve structures or processes that were not designed-in or pre-conceived by the creator. Core Wars programs, computer viruses, and worms are capable of self-replication, but fortunately, not evolution. It is unlikely that such programs will ever become fully living, because they are not likely to be able to evolve." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

CLOSED DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM. "The digital organisms are self-replicating computer programs, however, they can not escape because they run exclusively on a virtual computer in its unique machine language. From a single ancestral "creature" there have evolved tens of thousands of self-replicating genotypes of hundreds of genome size classes. Parasites evolved, then creatures that were immune to parasites, and then parasites that could circumvent the immunity." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn