Eight Questions for George Dyson (O'Reilly)

[Posted June 18, 2003 by cook]

O'Reilly interviews computer historian George Dyson. "One of the first significant expenditures of machine cycles at IAS (second only to thermonuclear bomb calculations and meteorology) was a series of experiments conducted by the viral geneticist Nils Aall Barricelli to see if code could be prompted to evolve, within the "artificial universe" of the von Neumann computer, on its own. All the questions raised by Barricelli are equally applicable and equally instructive with regard to the evolution of software "in the wild" today."

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