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ROUGH DIAMOND. "Ludwig managed a remarkable intellectual shift. He elevated the computer virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to an object capable of perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike behavior. He transformed a tool of vandals into a field of scientific study by emphasizing a computer virus' biological affinity." (Graffiti malware to academic artificial life). https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL INFORMS BIOLOGY. "Running his beloved viruses through assorted experimental hoops and mazes, Ludwig followed them to the conclusion that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms alone are just not mathematically fertile enough to have created and shaped life as we know it." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

BINGO! Code elements that can swap information randomly, and which have some inheritable memory of antecedent code? This sounds like the digital equivalent of viruses and bacteria in nature. https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

BREEDING CODE. “The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically evolving polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping between individuals that come into contact in the wild." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk 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

ANALOGY WITH LIFE IS CLOSER. "What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous." (George Dyson). https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn