Reginald D. Smith

Reginald D. Smith

The development and evolution of malware including computer viruses, worms, and trojan horses, is shown to be closely analogous to the process of community succession long recognized in ecology. In particular, both changes in the overall environment by external disturbances, as well as, feedback effects from malware competition and antivirus coevolution have driven community succession and the development of different types of malware with varying modes of transmission and adaptability.

Reginald D. Smith

The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that reasonably explains the number of distinct words as a function of length. We will be able to derive the frequency count, mean word length, and variance of word length based on the marginal probability of letters and spaces. The second, based on information theory, will demonstrate that the conditional entropies can also be used to estimate the frequency of distinct words of a given length in a language. In addition, it will be shown how these techniques can also be applied to estimate higher order entropies using vocabulary word length.