I recently discovered that there is no accurate linguistic translation of the words “Свой” and “Чужой” from Russian to English. A purely semantical translation of “Свой” as “Friend” and  “Чужой” as “Foe” will only be correct in this particular paired context of “Свой – Чужой” as “Friend – Foe”, which sometimes delivers the same idea as “Us – Them”. I am sure there are many idioms that are also translated as the “whole dish” rather than by ingredients.

Anyway, I am not going to discuss here linguistic deficiencies of languages.

I’d rather talk about the concept or paradigm of “Свой – Чужой”, or equally “Friend – Foe”, that we can observe in Nature as a way of enabling living organisms to survive as species through many generations. WHY, for example, one particular species does not produce off-spring as a result of mating with another species? I am sure geneticists would have some “unquestionable’’ answers to this question. But, probably those answers will either be too trivial that they wouldn’t trigger any further interesting technological ideas, or too involved that they’d require studying this subject at length before seeing any connections with non-genetic engineering.  Can we hypothesize about this “Big WHY” by looking at the analogies in technology?

Of course another question crops up as why that particular WHY is interesting and maybe of some use to us engineers.

Well, one particular form of usefulness can be in trying to imitate this “Friend – Foe” paradigm in information processing systems to make them more secure. Basically, what we want to achieve is that if a particular activity has a certain “unique stamp of a kind’’ it can only interact safely and produce meaningful results with another activity of the same kind. As activities or their products lead to other activities we can think of some form of inheritance of the kind, as well as evolution in the form of creating a new kind with another “unique stamp of that kind”.

Look at this process as the physical process driven by energy. Energy enables the production of the offspring actions/data from the actions/data of the similar kind (Friends leading to Friends) or of the new kind, which is again protected from intrusion by the actions/data of others or Foes.

My conjecture is that the DNA mechanisms in Nature underpin this “Friend – Foe” paradigm by applying unique identifiers or DNA keys. In the world of information systems we generate keys (by prime generators and filters to separate them from the already used primes) and use encryption mechanisms. I guess that the future of electronic trading, if we want it to be survivable, is in making available energy flows generate masses of such unique keys and stamp our actions/data in their propagation.

Blockchains are probably already using this “Свой – Чужой” paradigm, do they? I am curious how mother Nature manages to generate these new DNA keys and not run out of energy. Probably there is a hidden reuse there? There should be balance between complexity and productivity somewhere.