ZDNet UK

• CNET NETWORKS UK BUSINESS SITES:
• atlarge.com
• BNET UK
• silicon.com
• SmartPlanet.com
• ZDNet.co.uk

Twenty years of viruses and still no cure

• Tags:
• Viruses,
• Malicious Code,
• Worm,
• History Of Viruses

Published: 27 Nov 2003 15:25 GMT

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Von Neumann expanded Turing's concept to the creation of a universal constructor, a system that could replicate itself. This self-reproducing automaton, as he called it, used tens of thousands of elements -- each of which could be in any of 29 states -- to create another automaton on an imaginary grid. The system was so complex that it took more than 40 years for even a limited version of it to be implemented in hardware.

Survival of the fittest program
Von Neumann's work later served as the foundation for a new branch of computer science known a cellular automata theory, and it inspired other researchers to create simpler computer "creatures" and the field of artificial life. His pioneering research also spurred three Bell Labs researchers to put his ideas into action in the early 1960s.

In August 1961, researcher Victor Vyssotsky invented a game, dubbed "Darwin", in which small programs competed with one another to dominate a digital landscape. His colleague Douglas McIlroy programmed much of the game, including the code that would run the simulation. The third researcher, Robert Morris Sr, created a lethal digital creature that evolved and passed along its successful attack to its progeny.

"It was clear that by tinkering the rules to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the game, we could have revived it after Morris' devastating entry, but we had other things to do," said McIlroy, now an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth College. The game ran on an IBM 7090 system and was largely forgotten.

However, the researchers and their progeny were to have a profound impact on computers and the Internet.

Morris went to work for the National Security Agency. In November 1988, his son, Robert Jr, created the first worm to spread widely across the Internet. While "Darwin" didn't survive the evolution of its IBM 7090 computer system, the researchers' recreational activities led to the invention of a more popular game called "Core War", where players write battle programs in a language called Redcode and duke it out in a virtual-memory arena dubbed the Memory Array Redcode Simulator, or MARS. Many aficionados still play the game on the Internet.

But those games were all contained in an artificial environment. It took another game to help introduce viruses to computers and spread infections worldwide.

That game was "Animal", a program akin to the game "20 Questions", which became highly popular among mainframe computer operators in the 1970s. The game would ask a person to think of an animal and then ask questions for clues as to the type of creature it was. If the program guessed wrong, it would ask the player to provide a question and an answer that would differentiate the new animal.

• 
• 
• 
• 

• Share this article:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• Most Recent
• Most Popular
• Most Discussed