3 ms·

Not sure how much ASLR would be relevant w.r.t. genomes and cancer... Malicious hackers are on the one side very smart (the cancer genesis process is not smart

by nnq 9y ago

Not sure how much ASLR would be relevant w.r.t. genomes and cancer... Malicious hackers are on the one side very smart (the cancer genesis process is not smart at all), but on the other side they make poor use of evolutionary strategies, mainly because human hackers can't easily spawn "an army of clones of their mind" (cancer otoh is all about evolutionary strategy). Since the information about "what mutating a codon in a gene does" is not really available to "the attacker", it's as if the whole "address space" is already randomized by default... The "cancer problems" sound like it's more like being attacked by a really really really dumb hacker, who has access to an utterly insane amount (relatively speaking) of computing power! (...kind of hard to defend against such an attacker unless you invent modern crypto stuff like hash-signatures, blockchains etc. And our "DNA computer" is not at all designed for these types of math, recoding it to do this would probably be harder than developing mind upload capabilities or superhuman-AI :P Hence not likely to happen.)

domnomnom 9y ago
At one point during the cancer progress process the cancer is characterized by genomic instability (high mutation rate) and extremely high metabolism(high replication rate). The immune system is actually attacking the cancer cells successfully(in generalizing here in regards to cell types), and this may lead to an optimization process where the immune system is selecting for a cancer cell able to avoid the immune defenses. This interplay creates a microenvironment which is as you described, evolutionary in nature. As for cryptography, I would argue the biology contains hash signatures and other configurations common to cybersecurity(blockchain turns one problem into many IMO). While there may not be asymmetric cryptography, there is also no pseudorandom business.

by nnq 9y ago

domnomnom 9y ago

At one point during the cancer progress process the cancer is characterized by genomic instability (high mutation rate) and extremely high metabolism(high replication rate). The immune system is actually attacking the cancer cells successfully(in generalizing here in regards to cell types), and this may lead to an optimization process where the immune system is selecting for a cancer cell able to avoid the immune defenses. This interplay creates a microenvironment which is as you described, evolutionary in nature. As for cryptography, I would argue the biology contains hash signatures and other configurations common to cybersecurity(blockchain turns one problem into many IMO). While there may not be asymmetric cryptography, there is also no pseudorandom business.