🚀 go-pugleaf

   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!" :-)
--
				Pray for peace;      Bill
#Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Trickle-Down Economics: Giving money to government bureaucrats 
#	and hoping some will trickle down to the people who need help.