The Salamander
The recent efforts of a malicious net-based worm brought up an idea of mine. The idea is: can software "live" in the Internet? Every worm that we have seen comes nowhere near the capabilities needed to truly survive the Internet.
What I imagine is less a worm and more a salamander. A colony of non-destructive, adaptable, and independent salamanders, roaming the Internet, feeding off our CPU cycles. The question is; from where is the salamander born? We could give monkeys Emacs and GCC and see what happens (to represent the puddle of mud/evolution idea). Or we could play god and write what I would think would be the most interesting code created (to play God).
For a salamander to truly exist in the Internet its number one trait must be adaptability. It must be able to work like a living being to survive the hostility of the Internet. It must be able to find new ways to store and retrieve information. It must be able to redesign its IO interface to be able to talk to new hardware. It must be aware of other salamanders to share information and grow as a colony. Those are just a few of the traits this must posses.
The problem here is we cannot teach these things. We must take a minimalistic approach, giving the salamander the core tools be adaptable, and a set of basic rules it must follow. The basic rules are enough to perform a 'bootstrap' procedure; just enough to get it going on its own. It is also likely that we will loose many salamanders before it is able to survive on its own.
Another major issue is gaging its progress. For us to truly know how successful the salamander has become we need to be able to where they are, what they are doing, and analyze their current form. This could be done with a beacon tied into its main thought process that will report its location and perform a memory dump.
The important idea here is that I think the Internet is a habitable world for the right piece of software. With so many systems connected, their world would be immense. Just think of the Internet as a universe. Each system connected is a world, the ethernet is a wormhole, and LAN's are galaxies.
My only worry is this becoming destructive; not by design, but by the salamanders' need to survive.
What I imagine is less a worm and more a salamander. A colony of non-destructive, adaptable, and independent salamanders, roaming the Internet, feeding off our CPU cycles. The question is; from where is the salamander born? We could give monkeys Emacs and GCC and see what happens (to represent the puddle of mud/evolution idea). Or we could play god and write what I would think would be the most interesting code created (to play God).
For a salamander to truly exist in the Internet its number one trait must be adaptability. It must be able to work like a living being to survive the hostility of the Internet. It must be able to find new ways to store and retrieve information. It must be able to redesign its IO interface to be able to talk to new hardware. It must be aware of other salamanders to share information and grow as a colony. Those are just a few of the traits this must posses.
The problem here is we cannot teach these things. We must take a minimalistic approach, giving the salamander the core tools be adaptable, and a set of basic rules it must follow. The basic rules are enough to perform a 'bootstrap' procedure; just enough to get it going on its own. It is also likely that we will loose many salamanders before it is able to survive on its own.
Another major issue is gaging its progress. For us to truly know how successful the salamander has become we need to be able to where they are, what they are doing, and analyze their current form. This could be done with a beacon tied into its main thought process that will report its location and perform a memory dump.
The important idea here is that I think the Internet is a habitable world for the right piece of software. With so many systems connected, their world would be immense. Just think of the Internet as a universe. Each system connected is a world, the ethernet is a wormhole, and LAN's are galaxies.
My only worry is this becoming destructive; not by design, but by the salamanders' need to survive.
posted by Joe at
11:03 AM
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