Design
The Usefulness of Mutant Code
In The Usefulness of Broken Glasses, I speculated on using the topological concept of continuity to design a language in which small deformations would do less harm to programs than they do in existing languages — or at least, would make the effects of the harm easier to predict. I don't think anybody has tried this (it would be a fascinating exercise in topological semantics). But there is a machine code designed to adapt to mutation. You can spray bit-flips through its memory, and often, programs will still do the right thing, more or less. It's the machine code of Thomas Ray's Artificial Life simulator, Tierra.Related Reading
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