11 ms·
Swarms of soldier crabs can implement logical gates (2012)
- seanalexander 6y agoWhat a wonderful instance of carcinisation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
- saagarjha 6y agoNot sure I'm seeing the crustacean evolution here.
- nwallin 6y ago'Soldier crab' is a name attached to several unrelated crustaceans. The crustaceans studied in the paper are a variety of soldier crabs that are, in fact, true crabs.
- dormento 6y agoYep. Given enough time, even logic gates will converge into crabs :)
- yablak 6y agoDidn't I read about this in The Three-Body Problem?
- nixass 6y agoMy first thought exactly
- u02sgb 6y agoThink my first experience of this was Adrian Tchaikovsky. May not have been first though.
- loneranger_11x 6y ago+1
- jevgeni 6y agoLet’s just give them crabs different colored flags
- dr_dshiv 6y agoWhat's more complex: the logical gate made of crabs or an individual crab? What's more complex, a corporation or a person? A worm or a single cell in a worm?
- jrochkind1 6y agoIt would take an AWFUL lot of crabs acting as logic gates to model a crab brain or an entire crab. A single logic gate by itself is clearly less complex than a soldier crab. But if you really could model a crab brain perfectly in a turing machine (not clear you can), then let's make a crab brain out of crab logic gates, and then use those mega-crab-brains to make more mega logic gates, and put together a bunch of those to... you'd probably run out of crabs.
- Cederfjard 6y agoWhat’s the latest on whether a Turing machine possibly could model a brain, let’s say human? Are we very far from knowing that?
- ZeroFries 6y agoA Turing machine could never simulate anything down to the quantum level, including brains, which is necessary to solve the binding-problem.
- monocasa 6y agoI'm not aware of any data that says either that the brain relies on quantum effects, that quantum effects are needed to solve the binding problem, or even for sure that the binding problem is a problem that needs solving.
- robotresearcher 6y agoI also know of no such data, and only arguments that are not commonly accepted. Anyhow, what prevents a TM simulating a system 'at the quantum level'? A TM has infinite storage by definition, so the state space is not a limiter.
- trav4225 6y agoYes, but can I play Doom on it?
- loh 6y agoIf you had approximately 16,039,018,500 crabs, yes.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoHow did you get that number? Each bit needs about 40 crabs.
- undersuit 6y agoCrabout is pretty bad with this logic technology, especially in the burnout and the fan-out varieties.
- anonymousiam 6y agoDup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26494871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26494871
- gfaure 6y agoThis was published so close to April Fools' Day that I can't decide whether this is for real...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bfirsh 6y agoHere's an HTML version: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1204.1749/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1204.1749/
- dormento 6y agoI clicked the link without even looking at the url, hoping for maybe an HTML5 version of the logic gates where you could play with the number of crabs and see a real time simulation of the resulting logic gate. I don't know why I expected that.
- teruakohatu 6y agoI wish we would get to see more negitive result papers. I would love to read a paper entitled: "Logic Gates Can't Be Implemented by Wombats"
- andrewl 6y agoI would also be interested in a paper titled: Logic Gates Can Be Implemented by Wombats
- jonplackett 6y agoThat’s a hn front pager for sure.
- gaoshan 6y agoI'd bet money that a sufficiently large swarm of wombats, placed in a geometrically constrained environment, could indeed implement a logic gate.
- sitkack 6y agoI have been doing reversible computations on the WombatLattice for millidecades.
- gwern 6y agoHow would one prove that? It's easy to show crabs can make logic gates - just do it. How would you prove wombats can't ever implement logic gates? Maybe you just used the wrong treats, and peanut butter snacks would make them motivated enough to train.
- teruakohatu 6y agoOk fair enough, how about "Peanut Butter Does Not Make Wombats Turing Complete"? But I get what you are saying, if I were writing a paper it would be along the lines of: "Response reinforcement in wombats: Failure to obtain logic gate behaviors".
- hoppla 6y agoNow they need to add waves and connect it to the CLK pin. Tidal waves can serve as RST
- chrisweekly 6y agoTitle reminds me of a criminally under-appreciated work of sci-fi: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
- stakkur 6y agoThe ultimate offshore team.
- cheese_van 6y agoI click my claws therefore I am.
- mrec 6y agoI should have been a pair of ragged claws Just executing chores on damp PCs.
- ineedasername 6y agoThis is the clear replacement for computational resources when the EMP apocalypse that so much fiction predicts finally comes about. There will be accelerated breading programs selecting for ever smaller & smaller crab sizes, and while Intel is stuck trying to perfect 10 centimeter crabs, TSMC will be creating cutting-edge football field sized processors running on 3 centimeter crabs. Garbage collection in code will take on a whole new meaning as dead crabs are aggressively removed and repurposed into the local food supply, while protestors picket TSMC because the edible crab meat from 3cm crabs is miniscule & uneconomical to extract. Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
- __blockcipher__ 6y agoHilarious comment. But this is HN so I have to nitpick the minor flaws I noticed: > Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket. (1) Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained. (2) Fun fact, BTC tx fees already spiked high years back, during the bitcoin civil war. The day I had to pay an $80 transaction fee was the day I dumped BTC and never looked back. The tx fees were not due to some true technical limitation but rather an artificially imposed constraint when BTC got taken over from within by a faction that wrested control of /r/bitcoin and censored all dissent, convincing the unending hordes of speculators that the block size was a holy constant that could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”. Just a fun bit of history that felt relevant.
- grenoire 6y agoWhen the hash rates are at 1 per month, I don't think we will have enough hashing power, probabilistically, to match 10 minute marks. Verification of the hash to validate and consent to the block will also be at 1 per month, for consideration.
- 6y ago
- dwohnitmok 6y ago> Ethical note: No specific license was required for this work. The duration of any single experiment was so short that each crab never reached dangerous level, that the crabs were kept in comfortable condition, and that after all experiments the crabs were released to their natural habitats. Furthermore, on visual inspection,no crabs appeared to have been injured or adversely affected by the experiments. The way this ethical note is phrased seems to suggest the experimenters basically went to the beach and picked up a bunch of crabs and then released them again, as opposed to any sort of standardized procurement process, which I find amusing.
- dalbasal 6y agoIt makes me imagine the experiment taking place in a sand hole that they dug on saturday morning.
- ineedasername 6y agoIt's particularly amusing given that, once the experiment was done, it would have been perfectly acceptable to toss them all into a boiling pot of water at a local restaurant. As a matter of fact, loosely construed, that might be what they means by "natural habitat"
- thret 6y agoI just want to point out that humans also swarm effectively. Especially at protests or when there are fires nearby.
- vishnugupta 6y agoThe next logical step is to check for Turing completeness.
- makerofthings 6y agoAnts are used for computation in "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Really good story.