4 ms·

I 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 ful

I 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 ago
You could also buy just two then wait a while and through some inexplicable magic, you'll gave 64 cores of cat.
- zwirbl 5y ago
  But be aware the resulting catsplosion will grind the simulation to a halt at some point
- codetrotter 5y ago
  I’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 ago
  Are these the big/little cores I've been hearing so much about?
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Ah yes, the famous "Meow's Law" of kitty density doubling.
zdyn5 5y ago
Going for the 5dm or 3dm node size?
crate_barre 5y ago
Apple makes their own cats now days.
d--b 5y ago
So, 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 ago
  Eh, cats are cheap. Most of the money is spent on drugs and liquor. Quantum computing is well known for its party atmosphere.
motohagiography 5y ago
Like 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 ago
  I'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 ago
64 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    The 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 ago
Do these cat-cores need cryogenic cooling?
dylan604 5y ago
So the crazy cat ladies are really hardcore compute nerds that are just letting their cores rest?
- ineedasername 5y ago
  They'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 ago
There's the makings of a science fiction novel in there, somewhere.

kreeben 5y ago

You could also buy just two then wait a while and through some inexplicable magic, you'll gave 64 cores of cat.

zwirbl 5y ago
But be aware the resulting catsplosion will grind the simulation to a halt at some point
codetrotter 5y ago
I’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 ago
Are these the big/little cores I've been hearing so much about?
ineedasername 5y ago
Ah yes, the famous "Meow's Law" of kitty density doubling.

zdyn5 5y ago

Going for the 5dm or 3dm node size?

crate_barre 5y ago

Apple makes their own cats now days.

d--b 5y ago

So, 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 ago
Eh, cats are cheap. Most of the money is spent on drugs and liquor. Quantum computing is well known for its party atmosphere.

motohagiography 5y ago

Like 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 ago
I'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 ago

64 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  The 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 ago

Do these cat-cores need cryogenic cooling?

dylan604 5y ago

So the crazy cat ladies are really hardcore compute nerds that are just letting their cores rest?

ineedasername 5y ago
They'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 ago

There's the makings of a science fiction novel in there, somewhere.