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would normally be used in
conjunction with digital husbandry. This consists of writing a piece
of application code and inserting it into the genome of an existing
digital organism. A technique being used in organic genetic engineering
today is to insert genes for useful proteins into goats, and to cause
them to be expressed in the mammary glands. The goats then secrete
large quantities of the protein into the milk, which can be easily
removed from the animal. We can think of our complex digital organisms
as general purpose animals, like goats, into which application codes
can be inserted to add new functionalities, and then bred through
artificial selection to enhance or alter the quality of the new functions.
In addition to adding new functionalities to complex digital organisms,
digital genetic engineering could be used for achieving extremely high
degrees of optimization in relatively small but heavily used pieces of
code. In this approach, small pieces of application code could be
inserted into the genomes of simple digital organisms. Then the
allocation of CPU cycles to those organisms would be based on the
performance of the inserted code. In this way, evolution could optimize
those codes, and they could be returned to their applications. This
technique would be used for codes that are very heavily used such as
compiler constructs, or central components of the operating system.
Thomas S.Ray
Thu Aug 3 13:59:36 JST 1995