A short story for computer buffs-
THE VIRUS
"Where the hell did this come from ?" shouted Tony. In all of his 12 years of
service with InSys as expert in system software, he had never come across anything like this. The year was 2028 A.D. InSys had, over the last decade slowly but surely obtained monopoly over the software market. The open-software revolution had broken the spine of Microsoft and had spread like a craze among the professionals. But a few people from the software giant had broken off to start their own company at that time and it had payed off, literally. One thing was certain, these few had not forgotten a very important skill they had learned - the art of doing business. In less than a decade they had managed to get their operating system on about 80% of the worlds servers.
Only the most critical of them still ran GNU/Linux; a few of the top level nameservers still ran UNIX.
But these were tough days for InSys. The heart of their trouble was a new virus sweeping across their systems. In fact virus protection was what had made them so popular. Their philosophy was simple. The user sent a virus report with a core dump of the kernel and a patch would be made available to the whole user community within 24 hours. But this one was nothing like they had seen before. Tony and his team had received hundreds of complaints of their systems crashing in a span of two days. And they were helpless.
"The core dump shows nothing abnormal" said Raman. Raman had been with Tony
right from the beginning. He had been employed as a system hacker by Microsoft and had decided to join InSys because it was 'exciting'. "Except for about 70 odd bytes that don't seem to match, it looks like this fellow was just running a word processor". "Well, our word processor doesn't overload a system running on a Dextron processor with 2 GB of RAM", retorted Tony.
"You know, what I think Raman? This fellow was not running a word processor, he was running the virus".
"How is that possible? That virus looks just like our word processor! In fact, it matches up-to 98%. Even with a software tool that will do reverse engineering from a memory dump, that is still too far fetched."
Just then the door opened and Sam marched in. Sam was actually his nickname.
Sameer Kanade was an expert on machine learning and artificial intelligence, graduated from IIT Mumbai. He had joined the company five years ago and had risen in rank very rapidly. "Guys, I think I know the problem", he said with a very grim face. Raman knew he was not going to like what he was about to hear.
"Well?"
"We have a cold!"
"Pardon me? I didn't quite get you. Don't tell me after all this time you have come to talk of diseases.", snapped Tony.
"Not just a disease Tony, it's an epidemic. It's a virus ... and a bad one too".
"Then what are we waiting for? Let's release a patch".
"We can't do that Tony, I don't think it is possible".
"Why not?"
"Because we don't know what this virus looks like".
"We figured that out, Sam, it's actually a replica of our word processor", said Raman.
"You wish" said Sam "It can change it's form to match an already existing program on the system. It's very similar to a common cold, it mutates."
"But how can it be so good at resembling any damn program on the disk? And that too one that it randomly choses?"
"What I think is that it contains a genetic algorithm."
"I have sort of heard of these things, but could you elaborate?"
Sam continued, "You see, this virus spreads through email like many others. It then replicates itself many times. And it evolves like life evolved on earth."
"Okay, Darwin, how exactly does it manage to do that?" smirked Raman.
"First, about 10% of the members from the population mutate randomly, i.e. they change a few features at random. Then about 20% undergo sexual reproduction. In practice, they just interchange a couple of features that they are made of. Then a fitness figure is evaluated for all entities of the population. In our case, the fitness figure is the resemblance to a program it
finds on the disk. Then only about 90% of the fittest entities are passed on to the next generation. The cycle repeats. So in about 50 to 60 generations, the population produces a member with a fitness figure of more than 98%, i.e. one of them will resemble a program on the disk up-to 98%. The remaining 2% contains the destructive code."
"Holy, cow!" exclaimed Tony "Our systems have been infested with epidemics of mutating viruses. Next thing you know, they will replicate the very kernel and just wait for the next time the system boots. Then we will have viruses controlling the entire system. What do we do now Sam?"
"Pray Tony, pray that this time, the human won't evolve."
Just then Tony's phone rang. He didn't say anything, just kept listening.
A couple of minutes later, he ended his call and said "Guys, we have our first homo-sapien. And he is dwelling in our Internet mail server."
One month later about 80% of the worlds computers had to be taken down. The few
InSys systems that remained unaffected were also replaced. Now that InSys had gone bankrupt and shut down, there was no more support for their systems. Almost all of the worlds computing effort had been switched off. Business and commerce and come to a standstill. The world was staring in the face of the next Great Depression.
Back in his small home that Sameer had bought on retirement, he stared long and hard outside the window, remembering the good old days when humans used to switch off computers!
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