10 ms·
Is my cat Turing-complete?
- __alexs 5y agoWhat the author calls cat computing I like to call crab computing. I think crabs are a better analogy because crabs have successfully been used to perform logic operations in a lab and cats have not.
- telesilla 5y agoWarning, don't click if you need to be productive. https://www.reddit.com/r/crabcats https://www.reddit.com/r/crabcats
- colejohnson66 5y agoAnd if you don't like Reddit's new interface: https://old.reddit.com/r/crabcats/ https://old.reddit.com/r/crabcats/
- monkowl 5y agoEven better: cats are not only Turing-complete but also Turing-complete liquids! https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/answering-the-question-that-won-me-the-ig-nobel-prize-are-cats-liquid https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/answering-the-question-...
- ineedasername 5y agoI was almost out the door to pet shops and animal shelters so I could build a 16 cat-core setup over Thanksgiving. Then I figured I should at least read the full article before going through the trouble. It's a good thing too. Now I know that I should probably go for 64 cat-cores and treat it more like a quantum computer with the potential for rapid decoherence.
- kreeben 5y agoYou could also buy just two then wait a while and through some inexplicable magic, you'll gave 64 cores of cat.
- zwirbl 5y agoBut be aware the resulting catsplosion will grind the simulation to a halt at some point
- codetrotter 5y agoI’ve heard that in order for this to work it is important to ensure that one of the cats is the Model M version and the other must be a Model F version. Equally important, you must respond “No” when asked whether you want the “Neutering” feature enabled. This applies to both cats.
- howdydoo 5y agoAre these the big/little cores I've been hearing so much about?
- ineedasername 5y agoAh yes, the famous "Meow's Law" of kitty density doubling.
- zdyn5 5y agoGoing for the 5dm or 3dm node size?
- crate_barre 5y agoApple makes their own cats now days.
- d--b 5y agoSo, the 'cat-bit' is worth 1 if the cat is alive and 0 if the cat is dead? Now I understand why quantum computing requires so much funding...
- ineedasername 5y agoEh, cats are cheap. Most of the money is spent on drugs and liquor. Quantum computing is well known for its party atmosphere.
- motohagiography 5y agoLike Searle's Chinese Room, but with a cat in it, where observing it or asking it to do anything at all necessarily yields nothing, because it's a cat. Searledingers Catbox? But more generally I'd ask the question of, if you can train a conscious animal to execute 8 brainfuck instructions (+, -, <, > , etc..), could they also develop a writing system and express higher order languge concepts? Asking why animals don't write assumes they can't, as maybe we just need some kind of intermediate symbolic phoneme concept, as though - like BF for computation, there are some basic unit instuctions that you can combine and parse into anything, and if a border collie can distinguish words for hundreds of different things, I'd wonder if what we're missing is a set of metaphors that represent this underlying core instruction set. Things like musical notation and knitting stitch patterns are also thought to be Turing complete, so it implies the representation doesn't matter for computation, and computation is sufficient for representing most things, so the idea of finding some underlying instruction set for producing languages across species seems both fantastic yet loosely plausible.
- simonh 5y agoI'm sure you could train dogs, monkeys, or parrots to reasonably reliably perform logical operations. From that you could build a simple processor, but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much. It's not so much getting them to do the tasks, it's getting them all to reliably do them at the same time in synchronisation. Of course as with the guy in the Chinese Room that doesn't speak Chinese, none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing.
- lloeki 5y ago> none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing Strike "animals" out, and it sounds like any worker in a big enough org. (Maybe I should stop reading Kafka)
- _jal 5y ago> but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much That just means you need a redundant array of parrots operating in parallel, with a regulator to detect different answers to the same problem and retry.
- stinos 5y ago64 cat-cores ... rapid decoherence I'm glad you figured that 64 cat-cores is basically pure chaos. Well, for you, for the cores it's just their way of life: do random stuff for no apparent reason. Which is like the exact opposite of a computer.
- ineedasername 5y agoYes, if I can't get the system up & running for computational tasks, I figure I can always pivot the business model and sell its output as a world-class entropy source. My only problem is the lack of a moat around the model since anyone with a steady supply of cats, automated laser pointers, and a few hundred $/month in kitty kibble can reproduce my setup and make the whole thing a race to the bottom on price. I think at that point I could turn my accumulated knowledge into an excellent cat-entropy system servicing business, fine-tuning and optimizing other people's setups, advising on breed mixtures, laser speed, etc.
- tmm 5y agoThe business seems fraught with hairy (furry?) problems. The laser system has promise, but you need a source of random data to drive the movement of the laser pointer (maybe strap them to other cats?). Otherwise, an attacker who can predict the movement of your pointers may be able to predict the output of your entropy stream after observing the behavior of your cat colony (certain cats may prefer to hunt at different times of the day, or prefer to lay in wait and pounce vs giving chase, etc). Alternatively, you could observe a field (bed) of cats and record their chirality, assigning 0 to sinistral cats and 1 to dextral cats. The science[1] seems to indicate no preference for one or the other per cat, so your readings should be random. However, you may only observe one or two bit-flips per hour and during transitions it may take some time for the system to settle back down to a steady-state. [1] http://blog.dimview.org/math/2017/07/28/cat-chirality.html http://blog.dimview.org/math/2017/07/28/cat-chirality.html
- ineedasername 5y ago>lasers Good point. Would strapping a laser pointer to the back of one of the cats work to seed the system? After that I could divert some output into g-code movement instructions to the automated lasers. One thing I'm unsure of is room size. I figure I could map 1/0 to each tile in a grid based on the presence of a cat, but that means with too large or small of a room I'll have varying degrees of bit density. Stakes are pretty high too, since I'm pretty sure that putting cats in the mix might allow me to exceed the theoretical maximum of 1 bit of entropy per bit.
- 0xFFFE 5y agoDo these cat-cores need cryogenic cooling?
- dylan604 5y agoSo the crazy cat ladies are really hardcore compute nerds that are just letting their cores rest?
- ineedasername 5y agoThey're trying to use the unique nature of cats to exceed the theoretical maximum of 1:1 bits of entropy. This would create an entropic contagion event and that spread a heat death out into the universe in all directions. Cat ladies are evil nihilists.
- anotherevan 5y agoThere's the makings of a science fiction novel in there, somewhere.
- Intermernet 5y agoCats are a superset of Turing completeness. Cats are "undefined behaviour" https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112
- sdoering 5y agoThank you so very much. This just landed in my bookmark list of great bug reports that made my day. I really like the way the community dealt with this. (Disclaimer: My SO and me are also a foster home for cats. The cat behavior described is relatively normal esp. for one cat model currently "in use" here.)
- lstamour 5y agoI think my favourite part about the bug report is that it was closed as a duplicate! > This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1538615: Cat causes login screen to hang.
- noisy_boy 5y agoChaos Cat - the final QA tester. Ensure that your service can survive it.
- rob74 5y agoChaos Cat, a.k.a. the fluffy fuzzer...
- HenryKissinger 5y agoChaos engineering is a thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
- rob74 5y ago> To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard. I would recommend using a cat if available - otherwise, depending on the chair and on the weight of the tester, this might lead to permanent damage to the keyboard. I would definitely refrain from doing this if said keyboard is attached to a laptop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- secondaryacct 5y agoAhah super, bien joué la frontpage sur HN !
- praptak 5y agoThe ops don't seem to compose though. Cats are smart critters, so I think it would be possible to train one to do a set of operations that's actually Turing complete. Cat behaviourists and comp sci folks could work together on this.
- hef19898 5y agoThere is a guy in Russia who trained cats to do all kinds of circus tricks. Going from personal experience, a cat would be better suited to get a human to the calcalution for the cat then the other way round. If said cat is bored enough to bother trying so.
- peanut_worm 5y agoI tried to repeat this experiment and my cat had a Segmentation Fault
- marcodiego 5y agoThe other day there was a wasp going in and out of my room on the second floor by the window. I closed the window because it was annoying me. The wasp found an entry through another window, in another room open in the second floor. It was from the room next door. So, I just closed this other window. Again, it found an entry from another window. But this time, it started to impress me: it was from a room across the corridor! The wasp flew to the back of the house, found an open window, entered it and mapped to path through the corridor to my room. I then closed all the windows in the second floor of the house and bet it was over. I was wrong: the wasp came in from the front door, flow upstairs and found the room. It was even capable of doing the path in reverse so it could come in and out of my room. I closed all the doors and windows on the first floor, but forget to close the small bathroom window. This was enough for the small wasp map an entire new path to my room again almost immediately! Once it entered my room again, I opened the window again. It was smart enough to use it like it was simply choosing the shortest path. So, even the small brain of a wasp is able to run "computer vision" algorithms and are fast running "machine learning" algorithms. They are even able to run A* perfectly and merge input from various sensors to perform superb navigation using very little energy, producing almost not heat in a very lightweight package in real time with very low latency! I'm glad this critter is small. Nature is scary.
- YeezyMode 5y agoYou may have already, but you'd enjoy reading 'Conscious Mind Resonant Brain' by Stephen Grossberg.
- marcodiego 5y agoThanks for the hint/tip/advice. Never heard about it. Hope you found my tone similar or with some close ideas.
- jaclaz 5y agoWhat if I told you it wasn't the same wasp? One wasp trasmitted a map of your house to another and another one!
- csixty4 5y ago> Though they can, maybe cats are not designed to execute code after all? I'll test this with my cat named Turing this weekend to see if he gives better results.
- _Nat_ 5y agoIt's apparent that the author of this article has independently discovered the field of Catputation. However, this field has a long and rich hissssstory, which I'll try to summarize as time allows (or until I'm bored or see something shiny). FIRST: The great potential for Catputation has been recognized since pre-hisssstory, by the early innovators known as Egyptians who awed at the great possibilities and awww'd at the great paws-abilities. In those days, Catputers were primarily used to perform primitive functions, such as alerting household members of impending dawn (known to those in the field as "the early-morning zooomies") and high-frequency generation before electronic-oscillators were discovered (known to those in the field as "ddawww, the widdle kittdy is purrrring!"). Unfortunately, Catputation was limited in those days to largely clumsy, analog tasks. For example, Catputers had difficulty playing nicely with some peripheral systems, e.g. mice. It wasn't until much later that [the first digital-logic gate was invented, allegedly by Isaac Newton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_door#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_door#History), paving the way for more advanced systems. However, as we all know today, cats are fundamentally clawtum-mechanical creatures. Early on in clawtum-mechanical discovery, [Bose and Einstein were studying Dogputation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statisti...). Dogputers have quanta which can share the same space, [forming a stack](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogpile https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogpile) (known to those versed in the art as "dawwwww, look at dey widdle puppehs!"). This would later lead to [online-enthusiasts stockpiling Dogputation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin). However, in trying to form a stack for Catputation, Pauli made two simultaneous, serendipitous discoveries. First, they discovered that [kitties shouldn't be stacked up in the same place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle). And secondly, that violating this newly-discovered rule can result in many little bytes forming a larger unit (a kill-0-byte). Together, these discoveries led to [an initial theory of clawtum-Catputation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics). Progressing forward, optical computing became all the rage, and it was discovered that [optical-signaling interconnects were effective in facilitating high-speed Catputation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLagODygcbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLagODygcbs). There's more hisssstory to be told, though that's it for now!
- s_dev 5y agoReally did think this was the unix command 'cat' being Turing complete which makes sense.
- carabiner 5y agoWhy do programmers like cats so much?
- praptak 5y agoThe null hypothesis here is that everybody likes cats.
- ludamad 5y agoIndeed. Cats and dogs are part of endless marketing materials for a reason. They're as generic appeal as it goes (something something everyone loves babies)
- poulsbohemian 5y ago-- Easy maintenance. They need food and cuddles, but they don't need to be let out to potty ten times a day or require excess walks. -- They have a remarkably complicated inner life. This appeals to creative types, who also often have a lot going on mentally. -- They are conducive to the lifestyle, apart from wanting to stand on my keyboard. They will sit in the cat tree or on my lap for a long time, just wanting to be near. They will remind you when it's time to stand up and stretch.
- freddiecoleman 5y agoCATs are implemented in a turing complete language called Chialisp https://chialisp.com/docs/puzzles/cats/ https://chialisp.com/docs/puzzles/cats/
- teddyh 5y agoCats do not run optimal algorithms: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-a http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-a
- rawling 5y agoWow, that took me on a quick tour from "hey, I remember when that comic was running" through "hey, that comic is running again" to "hey, turns out that comic never stopped running?"
- Konohamaru 5y agoCats aren't Turing complete because they don't have intentionality. Everything it was doing was a result of instinct.
- visarga 5y agoNot much gap between instinct and intention. You could say instincts are default intentions selected by evolution.
- ilyagr 5y agoYou might argue that animals don't have intentions (especially if you never observed one closely). However, it seems difficult indeed to believe that a cat has less intentionality than an abstract Turing machine -- or your desktop computer for that matter.
- Konohamaru 5y agoActual Turing machines (okay, finite state approximations of them, which are the only ones that can physically exist...) have externally imposed intentionality.
- matbatt38 5y ago> Cats aren't Turing complete because they don't have intentionality. Everything it was doing was a result of instinct. Well, first, cats most likely do have intentionality. But mostly, why do you think intentionality is a requirement for Turing Completeness ?
- berkes 5y ago> one of the best ways to avoid misuses of a feature is to perform these misuses once, in my opinion I love this, because I'm convinced this is how we all learn. How my cats learn too, by the way. Good thing they have nine lives, because the amount of pans, doors, cupboards, firewood that has fallen on top of them just for the sake of "I want to know if I can misuse this new pile" is staggering.
- bitwize 5y agoThat cat looks a lot like my Ashley, who died nearly 14 years ago but is still missed. White chest patch, white toe tips, and all.
- kzrdude 5y agoDoes it have an infinite tape?
- blamestross 5y agoPeople keep forgetting you need infinite memory to be Turing complete. On a machine with finite memory, all operations are O(1).
- k__ 5y agoAll operations are O(1)?
- blamestross 5y agobusy beaver function of (a finite number) is hilariously big, but a constant. So there is a constant bound on the duration of all terminating programs using finite memory.
- tomcatfish 5y agoAlmost, but there are examples of non-termination still unless I am misremembering a definition (ex 20 GOTO 10).
- cyounkins 5y agoHonestly horses and carts are pretty good autonomous vehicles.
- nyx_land 5y agoI'll believe a cat is Turing complete when someone ports Doom to a cat