In the novels of
Arthur C. Clarke, a class of certain pieces of
computer program code similar to
computer viruses or
Trojan horses but far more deadly.
(The term "software weapon" was not used in the book; I am labeling these pieces of code by their function. -- Erbo) The function of these programs, in general, was to persuade a computer to devote its resources to calculating a result that would take an inordinately long (or possibly
infinite) time to complete--in essence, the ultimate
denial of service attack.
These programs were far more sophisticated than, for instance, a program to compute the value of Pi to the last significant digit (which a host machine could detect and stop), as they always presented the appearance that their task could be completed in finite time, hence "fooling" their host machines. They were so sophisticated that there was no cure for a machine affected by one; in some cases, a cure was a mathematical impossibility. They were given "names" by the researchers that discovered them generally reflecting the mathematics that went into them; some examples were:
Many examples of these weapons were stored, along with a variety of other
biological and
cybernetic weapons, in a secure vault within
Mt. Pico on the Moon. A number of these programs were combined into a weapon package to destroy the
Europan
Monolith in
3001, after it became apparent that the Monolith might very well destroy
Earth. The weapon was delivered by
David Bowman and
HAL 9000 to the Monolith, and its effects were successful in destroying the Monolith. Some of the programs, however, "infected" Bowman and HAL, who were placed, in storage on a
petabyte memory tablet, in the Pico Vault in hopes that a way might be found to restore them one day.
Source: Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey