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: ALife Park
Organization: Runic Writings UUCP Link: Convoco Hasturam
Message-ID: <D8DMxx.11r@runic.mind.org>
References: <3o61j0$cbp@ns.cityscape.co.uk> <3obo0c$i6d@gap.cco.caltech.edu> <3oct16$k88@acmew.gatech.edu> <3oe09l$dfd@gap.cco.caltech.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 19:17:42 GMT
Lines: 84

In an arcane scroll, Alexander Williams quotes the holy scripturist
C. Titus Brown, replying to the mystic words as written, saying:

>Well, look; probabilities eventually catch up with you.  There *are* software
>bugs; there *are* hardware bugs; these programs *do* have a history of
>exploiting anything they find.

   Very true, but you don't find virii walking through time or
communicating with things outside their light cone.  Those are about
as equally likely as the Tierran organism's escape into the Wilds of
the Internettal Plains.  It just cann't occur, none of the
instruction sets involved with Tierran organisms allow anything of
the sort.
   Its one thing to be alert to the possibilities, but completely
another to worry about apple trees uprooting themselves to march to
your house and lurk around outside your door, waiting for you to
leave so they can drop apples on your head.

>I do agree that it's pretty unlikely, but if you get 100,000 machines (which
>is far smaller than Tom actually wants) running across the net for weeks at
>a time, eventually *something* might happen.

   Not if the basic "physics" (if you will) that they run under
won't allow the evolution of these traits any more than I can
physically reach 3.5mi out of town to get a Pepsi from the machine
on the corner at that little store that keeps them /just/ the right
temperature.  I'd like it a lot if I /could/, but its not going to
happen.  No matter how much I evolve.

>It's ridiculous to be alarmist, but scientists also have a history of
>ignoring such things; it's also ridiculous to dismiss such a notion out
>of hand.  Both extremes are bad.  (The Jurassic Park scenario, however
>implausible scientifically, is VERY plausible in terms of the human
>interactions between the scientists).

   I almost walked out of JP in disgust the first time I saw it.
The term "anti-intellectual" springs to mind.  Of /course/ when we
have the capability to do something we /should/ do it.  There isn't
a question in my mind that without acting on discovery you might as
well invite the Dark Ages back into your living room.  On the other
hand, putting the work of DNA cloning of primordial beasties to work
to create a theme park, of all things, was tacky.  Better direction
would have been achieved by creating a "research area" with scads of
paleontologists, biotechnicians, etc for a five-year study.  Did we
see any?  No, just a bunch of lab-bound geneticists.
   On the other hamd, Tierran organisms /have/ gone through what I
think of as an acceptible "five-year study."  We know what the
instruction sets tend to, they've been beaten upon by the best in
the field, looked at, run millions of cycles upon and no one's
computer has spontaneously ordered pizza.  I think its a good,
solid, scientific move to say "let's universify it."

>ObWhatnot: it's like the Good Times virus thingy; everybody who is knowledgeable
>says things like "That can NEVER happen", when it's just not true.  E-mail
>viruses *are* possible, it's just doubtful that they could do all the things
>that this GT virus professes to do.  So the alarmists and the ostriches are
>both wrong.

   I will state for the record, anyone that thinks a mail-reader
indeterminate virus can be written needs to be taken out back and
shot to be burried in the apple orchard.  Contending with less,
Emacs rmail, elm/pine/etc internal readers, AoL's reader, CI$'s
reader, etc, all with nasty effects, boldly ignoring the fact that
none of these systems are truely embedded object interpreting
systems but rather just text-display mechanisms that run on more
types of terminals than God has hangnails...  Well, ludicrous is far
too weak a word.  Innane is more in line.
   If the world lived MIME, I might believe it.  If the GT virus was
supposedly targeting a specific reader on a specific platform, I
might swallow the line.  Both of those allow specialized attacks.
The sheer breadth of what the GT virus proposes is innane.
   To connect this back up with my first argument, the "ostriches,"
as you put it, are right.  Its insipid to contend that they are, in
fact, wrong.  To contend that not just some of the experts are
wrong, not just most, but everyone that {has looked into how mail
systems work|has studied Tierra's instruction sets} and considered
expert is out-and-out missing something, smacks of the kind of mind
that orchestrates conspiracy theories to explain the mass of missing
black left socks in the universe.
-- 
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
