Month: September 2022

SO ENDS this Fragment on symmetry breaking in animals. In many systems in nature, one encounters what at first sight seems like Byzantine complexity on steroids. Whether it is the double fertilization of plants, or animal polarity regulation, it seems to make little sense, and seems duplicative and inefficient. But when you consider that they were designed by chance, often due to the collision of gene systems, scrunched together, asking for elegance is simply the wrong question. View in LinkedIn

PERFECT PROTECTION. "While hiding the internals of a program can be used to protect the intellectual property contained within or protected by software, it can be applied for less righteous causes as well. Viruses, for example, try to hide their malicious intent through the use of self-modifying code." https://lnkd.in/dzxTmXb View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL AVATAR. "Suppose a sufficiently intelligent agent possesses a goal (or a preference ordering over outcomes, or a utility function over probabilistic outcomes). One possible means for the agent to achieve its goal is to construct another agent that shares the same goal." https://lnkd.in/d37SFab View in LinkedIn

AVATAR VEGETATIVE REPRODUCTION. "As a special case of agents constructing successors with equivalent goals, a machine intelligence may wish to change its own source code—self-improve. This can be viewed as constructing a successor agent that shares most of your program code and runs on the same hardware as you, then replacing yourself with that agent." https://lnkd.in/d37SFab View in LinkedIn

SELF-MODIFYING CODE. "Self-modifying Brainfuck, also known as SMBF, is a variant of brainfuck by Simon Howard, which allows a program to modify its own source code." https://lnkd.in/dgayvgB View in LinkedIn

CODING FLAGS. "Variables that are set and changed for the purpose of controlling the behavior of code are commonly called flags. FlagsAreSelfModifyingCode. That is NOT self-modifying code. Flags control which pre-existing code gets run. They do not modify the pre-existing code." https://lnkd.in/dknBRJD View in LinkedIn

FLAGS AS REGULATORS. "They do control behavior, but it is possible to usefully distinguish running immutable code with varying behavior due to varying inputs vs. direct mutation of the code." https://lnkd.in/dknBRJD View in LinkedIn

CONTROLLING GENE REGULATORS such as promotors is thought to be better than mutation in biological systems. View in LinkedIn

"PROMOTOR TURNOVER has occurred at the majority (>56%) of protein-coding genes since humans and mice diverged. Tissue-restricted promoters are the most evolutionarily volatile where retrotransposition is an important, but not the sole source of innovation." https://lnkd.in/d6USApZ View in LinkedIn

REWIRING GENE REGULATION. "Our results suggest that promoter gain and loss is an important process in the evolutionary rewiring of gene regulation and may be a significant source of phenotypic diversification." https://lnkd.in/d6USApZ View in LinkedIn