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comment by am_Unition
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.





Devac  ·  2698 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  ·  2698 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  ·  2698 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. :/