Re:How Microsoft computer scientists and researchers are wor...
by TeMPOraL on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @10:44AM
(#12548583)
It's an arms race, but we can in principle stay mostly ahead in it. Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values. We know how the optimization process works here, what we lack today is enough control over the problem space to screw that process up.
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Re:How Microsoft computer scientists and researchers are wor...
by dekhn on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:50AM
(#12549296)
Arms races are a great way to bankrupt yourself. as for "Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values", that's a nice speculation, however, it's just a speculation, and not one well-founded in fact.
Re:How Microsoft computer scientists and researchers are wor...
by TeMPOraL on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:58AM
(#12549385)
It's a one race we can't avoid - biology will not cooperate to stop evolving pathogens if we collectively agree to abandon medical research.
As for the speculation part, it kind of follows from the math of things. Evolution is very dumb compared to us, it just has the numbers advantage.
Re:How Microsoft computer scientists and researchers are wor...
by dekhn on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @12:29PM
(#12549703)
I heartily encourage you to look at the current state of antibiotics and appreciate that while evolution may not be "smart", it has more advantages that just numbers.
As for cancer, it's not clear that more effective cancer will evolve in the near term if we don't apply selection pressure to it- cancer has existed in humans with little to no change for millions of years and in mammals for far longer than that.