General > Biology
Viruses
Numsgil:
--- Quote ---a rule could be that anticommand can only by anticommands, not antianticommands
--- End quote ---
No, that's begging the question.
How about this: Upon insertion, viral DNA takes a number of turns to "activate". This would represent the time it takes a real virus to enter a cell and attach itself to the cell processes.
Thus a self-aware genome could easily find and exterminate the invading gene.
shvarz:
RNA is almost never completely single-stranded, it always forms hairpins, so ribosomes are used to prying the two strands apart.
shvarz:
Nums, these are really just details, you need to look at the bigger picture. I am questioning the whole idea of a .mkvirus command.
Here is an example: say we introduce a new command called .mkmultibot, which would take a single-cell bot and transform it into a pre-defined fully-functional multi-cellular organism. Then we let evolution "figure out" how to use this command. Would you consider that to be an accomplishment on part of evolution? I won't. Because what we want is to make simple rules and then using those rules create a multibot.
Same with viruses. What we need is a system of commands useful in real-bot functions that can be hijacked to create a self-replicating message spreading from bot to bot.
I think we even have "viruses" now without the .mkvirus command (I am not sure, as I am not good with coding bots). If a bot has a gene that fires an information-carrying particle (for example telling another bot where food is), then it is possible to hijack that system to pass around information just for the sake of passing information. That, in essense, would be a virus.
Numsgil:
Yeah, I thought a bit along those lines. I guess the real question is:
1. Can only DNA be passed in long lasting shots?
2. Who/what gets to control what gets placed into such a shot?
Greven:
To my knowledge a lot a vira actual use protein reconition (wrong spelled ;)) on a cell's surface to know which cell to infect, therefore a cell which mutates to have a different pattern of protein, then a particular virus cant reconize it and therefore can not infect it, we could add somekind of this incorporating the metabolism / env. grid.!
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