The simple intuition from evolution in the wild doesn't apply here, though. If I'm a creature in most of life's history with a superior mutation, the fact that there are lots of others of my kind with inferior ones doesn't hurt me -- in fact it helps, since they make worse competitors. But on the internet, there are intelligent creatures gunning for you, and a virus or worm lives mostly by stealth. Thus your stupider siblings are likely to give your game away to people your improvement might otherwise have fooled.
And detrimental mutations greatly outnumber beneficial ones. On Sunday 30 September 2007 06:05:55 pm, Matt Mahoney wrote: > The real danger is this: a program intelligent enough to understand software > would be intelligent enough to modify itself. It would be a simple change for > a hacker to have the program break into systems and copy itself with small > changes. Some of these changes would result in new systems that were more > successful at finding vulnerabilities, reproducing, and hiding from the > infected host's owners, even if that was not the intent of the person who > launched it. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=48322593-19e4a6
