Self-Replicating Turing Machines and Computer Viruses

This paper reviews self-replication in the context of (partial) recursive functions and Turing computability. By the Church-Turing thesis, these are equivalent to other models of com-putation. The theory is linked to applications in the area of computer viruses. We address the views of various authors with respect to the (in)adequacy of Turing machine equiva-lent models for computer viruses