a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  2696 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A self-replicating, mutating, program

And to think, I felt stupid before I got a notification.

Nice tho.

Edit: Devac I will open this and mess with it soon, but my python IDE takes about one hour to "check for updates". Plus, I'm writing in another language right now, and I don't wanna cross the streams :/. Do you ever get in over your head in your research commitments?





Devac  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    And to think, I felt stupid before I got a notification.

Come on, man. The title is a literal click bait and I knew from the start that it must be doable. You'll see yourself how primitive is this thing. Plus you shouldn't feel stupid, period.

    Do you ever get in over your head in your research commitments?

Constantly.

am_Unition  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.

Devac  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    looks like it iteratively renames the file a variant of ACfileGT (the nucleotides), where the capital letters change

This line? No, it just generates all possible 3-element combinations with repetitions from a set "ACGT". There's no file handling as of yet.

    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.

That's still doable, I think. Just far less likely to produce an actual line of succession. I think that I can do sort of a compromise between my lazy solution and yours "this might have to reinvent compilers" formulation: what about having a procedurally changed block or mutation parameters like 'add a nested conditional determining a future mutation type' or 'remove this loop that does something the nucleotide chain'? That only needs to comply with Python's syntax but you can add pretty much anything.

Anyway, I told you that it wasn't impressive. :P

wasoxygen  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

While searching for help with a module error I got invited to Google foobar, which sounds like something that will keep me distracted for a while.

Devac  ·  2695 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Codepad uses a really old version of Python (2.5.1). Itertools got worked on a lot since ~2006. ;)

EDIT: This is bullshit. I'm troubleshooting this kind of crap on a daily basis and never even heard about foobar. :/