Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we know how exactly this happens? How fast this process "converges"? How big is the search space and how fast new candidates are generated?
About 3e11 combinations are possible, about 10 billions different antibodies will be generated by a human body (numbers I just sourced from Wikipedia). The shuffling is done by recombination, which means joining segments of DNA in a random fashion (a similar recombination process is actually used for DNA repair, though with somewhat less randomness!) There's a lot more to say about all of this, but I don't know how m…
Does that imply that there's a good chance someone's immune system will just fail to generate any appropriate antibodies against a novel intruder? Or does the "fuzzy matching" aspect mean that exploring a small percentage of the space mean you're very likely to get at least some degree of success?