[ Thanks to Ken Guest
for this link. ]
“Young Linux users these days are few and far between, even
though the small existing number is growing. However, at this
year’s Young Scientist Exhibition in the RDS, several projects
incorporated Linux machines. Ours was one of these projects.
Three students from Drogheda, Trevor Johnston, Alex McAllister and
myself, Darius McGann, first decided to enter a project three days
after the closing date for entries. Thankfully, due to Esat
Telecom’s flexibility, we were accepted into the competition. And
so we began work on our project.”
“The topic on which we had decided to work was chosen quickly
and due to our lateness in entering the competition and partially
because of my stupidity, we ended up having to work on artificial
intelligence (AI). As we started working it became immensely clear
that we were in deep trouble as far as material work was concerned.
How could we experiment on something that still has not been
discovered? If you have any ideas how it could be done, please let
us know.”
“Eventually, after the realisation of premature complete failure
had sunk in, we began toying with the idea of AI simulation
programs and how theyn could be used as part of a research project.
As we all know, research projects won’t win anything at the Young
Scientist (or “Yousci”), but we decided to go “for the laugh”. As
we experimented with programs we learnt a little about AI. It was
then that we decided it write our own program written to act as a
simple operating system but which acted in the same way as a virus,
in that it copies itself and spreads throughout the system.”