a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
am_Unition  ·  2698 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A self-replicating, mutating, program

Let me help you with your fishing technique. I would've said:

    PHYSICIST WRANGLES A MUTATING PYTHON AND CLAIMS VICTORY AFTER AN HOUR'S TIME

I checked out the code briefly. Been almost a year with no Python, I think it'll show. I see some even and odd handling, random number generation and handling, looks like it iteratively renames the file a variant of ACfileGT (the nucleotides), where the capital letters change. Something like that? Edit: lol, you described as much, I think, I missed the fact that the current naming serves a crytographic seed

What I had in mind was a quine in which the actual commanding (the guts of it) randomly, iteratively changed inside of the program, but it would almost always still mutate in a way that was replicable. Maybe it could eventually produce randomized, unforeseen fatal errors (digital cancer) after some large number of repetitions. Still a very open-ended problem, but I think I got a bit over ambitious with it.