In Search of Certainty

Appendix B. Chapter Notes

Notes

¹ I first proposed this similarity in the keynote at the International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2008) held in Chicago, IL, from 2nd to 6th of June 2008.

² After the presentation of this paper, I was approached by an attendee from the University of New Mexico to ask whether I knew of Stephanie Forrest’s research group. They had coincidentally just written some papers with a different focus also about the idea of Computer Immune Systems. Although our work did not overlap very much, we followed each others’ work for a number of years, and kept in touch.

³ This reminded me of cartoon I saw years ago of a slide-rule mounted in a glass case on the wall of a datacentre, with a sign saying: “Break glass in case of emergency.”

⁴ Physicist Kenneth G Wilson was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in scale and what is known in physics as the renormalization group. Renormalization is the an expression of the how the magnitude of an effect seems to be stronger or weaker depending on the scale at which you observe or interact with the phenomenon. His work points out that this goes far beyond mere perception. It has to do with interaction itself, and the finite range of information.

⁵ Evolutionary biologists can no doubt speculate whether this quality of humans to separate local events from the bigger picture has evolved from a need to survive and adapt without going mad, or whether it is a side effect of being able to cope with the limitations of physics, ...