🚀 go-pugleaf

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!" :-)
+ --
+                               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.

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.

--
Dan Drake
drake@Autodesk.com