I don't think the code metaphore is a good one. Its more like reverse engineering self duplicating and self healing nanotech hardware i.e. hardware so complex i

I don't think the code metaphore is a good one. Its more like reverse engineering self duplicating and self healing nanotech hardware i.e. hardware so complex it can't be artificially designed with current understanding. The situation is made more complex by the fact that this hardware is interacting with different types of other hardware such as viruses and bacteria.