Discriminative power of the receptors activated by k-contiguous bits rule

Abstract

The paper provides a brief introduction into a relatively new discipline: artificial immune systems (AIS). These are computer systems exploiting the natural immune system (or NIS for brevity) metaphor: protect an organism against invaders. Hence, a natural field of applications of AIS is computer security. But the notion of invader can be extended further: for instance a fault occurring in a system disturbs patterns of its regular functioning. Thus fault, or anomaly detection is another field of applications. It is convenient to represent the information about normal and abnormal functioning of a system in binary form (e.g. computer programs/viruses are binary files). Now the problem can be stated as follows: given a set of self patterns representing normal behaviour of a system under considerations find a set of detectors (i.e, antibodies, or more precisely, receptors) identifying all non self strings corresponding to abnormal states of the system. A new algorithm for generating antibody strings is presented. Its interesting property is that it allows to find in advance the number of of strings which cannot be detected by an "ideal" receptors repertoire.