h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember someone somewhere having written that they thought that the requirements of artificial life were fulfilled by computer viruses, and this seemed to make some sort of sense. Most (pretty junior) biology text books seem to define life by the actions of things, eg. reproducing, eating, excreting, all of which seem to apply to computer viruses in some sense. I know that it's not life in the usual picture of things, but seems certainly on a par with organic viruses, which also don't look much like life as we usually use the word.

Do you think they qualify?

HI jb!

This is an interesting point of view, if I ever saw one.

Granted, computer-virusses multiply (sort of).

But the rest? I don't see them use any food, nor do I see them excrete anything. They destroy data by simply overwriting it with a copy of themselves. They don't NEED the data they destroy for the purpose of feeding themselves.

Organic virusses do also copy parts of themselves into other systems, but they still use some means of "fuel". The analogy therefor doesn't work completely, yet.

Maybe there are more things in that article, that you have forgotten.
Maybe some of those arguments are important to this matter.
If such computer-virusses would be able to "learn" something, and pass that "knowledge" on to other representations of themselves ("kind of an "evolution"), they would at least have one point more to their advantage, I think...

The thought is still an interesting one, tho, and I may even find reasons to still use this in the end.

If you can find out more about this bit, I would love to hear it. Any other thoughts are also welcome... Thanx for sharing!

I think the use of `food' was probably more looking at processor time etc. In the same way that organic viruses use ATP - the host's food - for energy to do stuff, so computer viruses use processor time in host machines to effect changes, reproduce etc. I agree about excreting, though - I guess you could program a virus to produce garbage, but it's not exactly vital.

Ok, I forgot about the energy... so indeed it does "eat". Well, it's coming more and more alive now Your suggestion is stored in memory for future addition.