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How similar is hacking to 21st Century pharma discovery?

1 points by firebones ↗ HN
Reading this thread on the latest advancement in antibiotics, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852487) I noticed several commenters touching on various strategies that seemed eerily similar to hacking...penetration testing, brute force fuzz testing, vulnerability analysis. The language and the medium is different, but at an abstract level, the strategies appear to be similar.

For someone versed in both worlds, how similar is it in reality, and are there advancements in say, white hat hacking that have counterparts in medicine/biology/genomics?

2 comments

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dekhn
There are superficial similarities, as well as some deep fundamental relationships. Studying biological systems from the viewpoint of information theory has been very productive. Systems theory, too. IMHO, these approaches don't really get to the deep core of biology (my guess is there are aspects of information processing in biology which have no equivalent in CS, but they provide valuable tools to study it).

Those things aren't unique to hacking, btw- they are common in warfare and intelligence, predating computers (well, maybe not fuzz testing).

That said, it can be misleading and people often stretch the analogy too far (DNA splicing is kind of like the C preprocessor but the ribosome is no compiler)

firebones
I can understand information theory and systems theory, so maybe the question is whether there is anything in "hacking" that is separate from those two theories that is being explored?