Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!swrinde!emory!mind.org!runic!thantos
From: thantos@runic.mind.org (Alexander Williams)
Subject: Re: Tierra Working Group Report
Organization: Runic Writings UUCP Link: Convoco Hasturam
Message-ID: <D8DorD.2GL@runic.mind.org>
References: <3odk4d$sb2@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <3oe6s8$4u5@acmey.gatech.edu> <3ojf3i$235@gap.cco.caltech.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 19:57:11 GMT
Lines: 45

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

>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.

   Stripping the jungle should be made problematic with the addition
of a simple communications security system; have a configuration
file with the sites that permitted for both outgoing and incoming
organism transfer (and for open sites, a configuration option for
"all incoming) which defines the maximum number of organism
xfers/size/whatnot per diem, hour, minute, whatnot.  That simple fix
removes the concern for J Random Outsider having flood-access to
your Island without having wormed himself into your confidence
first, and also gives you the ability to chop his access should he
be getting too friendly.
   This is just a simple security system that should be obvious when
designing it, since it removes the ability to perpetrate and gives
the ability to allow so much.  If you have three systems on-site
that you /want/ to have nearly complete access to one another's
Soup, say creating that volcanic-island-trilogy setup that I
mentioned in a previous missive, you tweak the alloweds up on the
other two sites for each server.  If you want to allow a UUCP site
to exchange organisms once a week, but a tonne at that time, you
tweak the alloweds, in and 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.

   Definitely a question of how deft the programmer is at grinding
out a Reaper' functional add-on to the Reaper.  Breeding for a
hybrid might have excellent results.

-- 
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
