Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS [LWN.net]

Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS

Posted Oct 2, 2013 14:29 UTC (Wed) by oever (subscriber, #987)
In reply to: Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS by nix
Parent article: Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS

there is no bit-flip analogue of translocation!

Yes there is: instead of moving the code, you flip bits in the address referring to the code.

*None* of this is true of human-written software, ergo there is no evidence that it can evolve

unless it was written to mutate and evolve.

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Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS

Posted Oct 4, 2013 11:48 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yes, obviously one can design software specifically to evolve under directed mutation, and this has been done and is useful -- but unless we design *everything* that way (including OSes), we'll never get a machine analogue of evolution, and even software designed to evolve under directed mutation isn't going to evolve in the same way under random bit-flips, because the virtual machine that executes that is a) almost certainly much larger than what it's executing and b) not implemented in this fashion, so the first bitflip there and you're probably toast.