Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!swrinde!emory!mind.org!runic!thantos
From: thantos@runic.mind.org (Alexander Williams)
Subject: Re: ALife Park
Organization: Runic Writings UUCP Link: Convoco Hasturam
Message-ID: <D8qIG0.Cv@runic.mind.org>
References: <3o61j0$cbp@ns.cityscape.co.uk> <D8DMxx.11r@runic.mind.org> <3otcdi$abc@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <Pine.A32.3.91.950513143057.15734A-100000@aix12.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de>
Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 18:09:35 GMT
Lines: 38

In an arcane scroll, Alexander Williams quotes the holy scripturist
Sven Sahle , replying to the mystic words as written, saying:

>Seriously: I think the main danger is not that evil organisms will be 
>created or develop by themselfs but that due to some bug in the physics 
>net-Tierra might have serious side-effects like crashing computers or 
>loading the net more than expected.

   Neither of these effects, however, are within the "knowledge set"
of the Tierran architectures.  Properly, they're questions regarding
the architecture networking code of net.Tierra.  Crashing the /real/
CPU of the machine running net.Tierra isn't of evolutionary
advantage, its a bug in the server.  If it goes offline, so do they.
Probably resulting in a heavy debug or scrapping the thing
altogether.  The question of net.load is moot, in the context of
things the Tierrans can access; nothing they can access /directly/
will return the system load, and shouldn't.  The more independent
the Tierra.architecture and the real.architecture are, the better
all around for a multitude of security reasons.
   Thus, neither of your points fall /inside/ the purview of the
Tierra.architecture itself, but rather are concerns about the
security of the net.aware portions of net.Tierra.

>This would be just like sofware-bugs in other programs. But the program 
>net-Tierra has some build-in feature to actually bring in effect every 
>bug in it (because the organisms will try anything that is possible 
>within Tierra).
>'Normal' programs do not have this feature.

   'Normal' applications have something more nasty by far: inept
users.  If you don't think /they'll/ pound an application's holes
faster than a million generations of a million-entity Tierran soup,
you've obviously never worked the help lines...
-- 
thantos@runic.mind.org (Alexander Williams)     | PGP 2.6 key avail
  Should we shed our mental pants and compare   | DF 22 16 CE CA 7F
  the size of our consciousnesses?              | 98 47 13 EE 8E EC
      Jan Sand to Marvin Minsky                 | 9C 2D 9B 9B
