🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <17786@autodesk.COM> drake@Autodesk.COM (Dan Drake) writes:
>wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705) writes:
>+
>+    lou@Cadence.COM (Louis K. Scheffer) writes:
>+    +The basic approach would be to build a bacteria that acts as a DES key search
>+    +machine.  Each bacteria generates keys at random, decrypts the encrypted block
>+    +with the key, and compares the result with the plaintext.  If there is a match,
>+
>+ A real computer virus, eh?  The difficult part is to gen up an enzyme
>+ that generates _random_ numbers, represented as e.g. random proteins.
>+ (OK, I'm not sure getting a bacterium to do DES is really that
>+ straightforward either, but ....)  Enzymes like to always do the same thing.
>+ The obvious approach is to use mutations to create the randomness,
>+ but the mutagen would also presumably affect the compare-the-results genes.
>+ So you've now got a very large number of very small monkeys typing away,
>+ and another crowd of monkeys randomly yelling "This stuff is Shakespeare!" :-)

	Indeed, error rates in biological systems are of the order
	of 10^-9 - 10^-12 per generation.  Mutagenesis ups the error rate
	and kills the beast more often than not (except when you have silent
	substitutions).  So, at 10^8 bugs/mL, needing 10^9 mutants at
	a mutation frequency of 10^-9, you need 10^8 mL, or 10^5 L to
	get all your variants.  You can get about 1 mL of this on a
	Petri dish to screen for your mutant so you need 10^8 Petri
	dishes with a vol. of 50 mL or, 500,000 litres of Petri dishes.
	With practice, you can innoculate 5 plates/min so the whole thing
	would take 2.10^7 min or about 100 manyears. Piece of cake, now
	to screen them.
>
>It's surprising that no one has mentioned the immune system here.
>Generating a zillion variant cells which make a zillion variant
>antibodies, apparently at random, is just what makes it possible to
>respond to antigens that haven't been invented yet.  And we've mostly
>solved the compare-the-results problems, though people suffering from an
>auto-immune disease may take exception.  None this proves that you could
>attack decryption this way, but it's a sort of existence proof.

	Mechanistically, it's a little more limited than zillions
	(trillions is a possibility).


	Alec Chambers