Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!europa.chnt.gtegsc.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!torn!nott!cunews!freenet.carleton.ca!FreeNet.Carleton.CA!av574
From: av574@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Tim Sallans)
Subject: Re: Tierra Working Group Report
Message-ID: <D89zE4.J85@freenet.carleton.ca>
Sender: av574@freenet3.carleton.ca (Tim Sallans)
Reply-To: av574@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Tim Sallans)
Organization: The National Capital FreeNet
References: <3ojf3i$235@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <3odk4d$sb2@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <3oe6s8$4u5@acmey.gatech.edu>
Date: Mon, 8 May 1995 19:56:28 GMT
Lines: 60

In a previous posting, Charles Ofria (charles@regulus.krl.caltech.edu) writes:
> In article <3oe6s8$4u5@acmey.gatech.edu>,
> Kurt Chirhart <gt6935e@prism.gatech.edu> wrote:
>>  I read the Tierra Working Group Report and a couple things struck me.
>>The first security concern was about arrant hackers writing code to
>>take advantage of Tierra's basic functions for dishonest uses.  The
>>planting of a cash crop in a rainforest and the crop's implied failure
>>from biodeverse competition seems a way to prevent this.
> [munch]
> 
> Ah, but what if you strip areas of the rain-forest first.  One concern is
> that a hacker will first find a way to wipe out life on the tierra islands
> before sending his own creatures in.  The can be done in a number of clever
> ways, the most obvious of which is just bombarding a soup with so many
> incoming creatures, that all the creatures already there are killed off.
> 
> Inserting life of your own is especially nasty if whet you re-insert is
> a genetically modified version of the best of the creatures you wiped out.
> 
> I should note however that I don't think it likely that someone would do
> this, or that if they did they would be able to easily come up with a
> creature which would successfully preform the calculations they desired.
> 
> 
> 						--- Charles
> 


I've just finished reading the working group report posted to this
newsgroup, and one thing struck me as not being addressed.  There was
some consideration of people poisoning the soup with their own
digital creations in order to take advantage of the massive computing
potential of the "virtual puddles", and also for the digital organisms
rampaging a la Morris Worm.  I would agree with many of the points
brought up in the report deeming both of these scenarios unlikely or
inviable.

However, I would be concerned about an individual on a particular
platform redesigning their local Tierra environment to provide an interactive
shell with the outside internet world.  What if someone modified
the reaper to select for other than error count or complexity of
operations.  What if they rewrote the Tierra op codes to allow 
real world interfacing and modified the reaper to reward successful
interaction.  Then the massive diversity of the connected system would
serve to feed the creativity of an individual virus maker, feeding them
to the system at large.

Again, this would be an interesting project in it's own right, and
probably very difficult to realize...but someone might try it, and
who knows what may happen when creative anarchy gets involved with
genetic diversity. <grin>

Just a few of my thoughts...

					--Tim

--
Tim Sallans               "Scientists follow their probability instincts
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada    as their hominid forefathers followed theirs.
av574@freenet.carleton.ca  Scientists just know more math." -- Bart Kosko
