[Webcomics] A scary, scary idea

[roseembolism]

 SO, am I the only one who finds  <a href="http://www.xkcd.com/">this XKCD</a> terrifying?  

I mean, this sort of forced evolution is the sort of thing that's going to eventually lead to language skills, and then inevitably to humans huddling like roaches in the corners of the new post-Singularity world.  At least that's what the SF writers keep telling me...

Comments

[mithriltabby]

The closest worms get to evolution is changing their signature frequently; I haven’t heard of any that actually change their code on their own. Once someone releases a self-evolving worm, you’ll see people paying a lot more attention to security— stomping down hard on buffer overflows and executable attachments and anything else that allows foreign code to enter a system. There’s a fun trail of evolution of a spamming worm in Peter Watts’ Maelstrom.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

*Gasp!* You mean illustrious writers like Greg Bear could be WRONG!?!?!?!

And yes, in all seriousness, I'm aware that there are a couple elements missing from the system in the comic to make it a real threat. Though doing something like (for example) periodically taking code elements out of the viruses and randomly assorting them among half the population might go a ways to evolving viruses.

This is actually kind of a follow-up to the last post I did, in that I'm pretty sure this will eventually be used as the background for a movie or novel by a Big Name Author.

[mithriltabby]

Designing software to evolve is quite tricky, and tends to lead to very peculiar results. There was one time that someone tried to solve a problem that way, and the eventual optimal solution turned out to make no sense when they looked at the code. It turned out that it was exploiting a timing behavior of the processor while it was running at a particular temperature...