4 ms·
That evolved antenna is a piece of wire with exactly 6 bends. It's extremely simple, the exact opposite of a hard to understand mess.
by esperent 1y ago
That evolved antenna is a piece of wire with exactly 6 bends. It's extremely simple, the exact opposite of a hard to understand mess.
- rcxdude 1y agoLacking symmetry, it's extremely hard to understand how the antenna actually works (i.e. why those six bends, as opposed to any other random six bends).
- jmogly 1y agoI love the idea of faith based technology, where it just works but nobody is capable of comprehending why or how.
- dialup_sounds 1y agoPraise the Omnissiah!
- isolli 1y agoThis is also quite common in medicine...
- probably_wrong 1y agoI've had bugs go away when I added `print("working fine until here")` to the preceding line. So if someone told me "this line is needed but I don't know why", I wouldn't even blink.
- kbelder 1y agoMy coworker took down our site briefly by removing an html comment that said "don't remove this comment".
- MITSardine 1y agoLoad bearing print statement! I've had a few of those, I think they're usually a symptom of stack corruption.
- rcxdude 1y agoOr a concurrency/timing issue, where the delay of the I/O changes things just enough to make them work on your setup.
- yencabulator 1y agoBack in the day the QA department would veto a release candidate of our firewall product due to performance degradation if a network cable in the testing equipment was bent too much during validation runs. Rearrange the cable and next test run would pass. Timing matters.
- RedShift1 1y agoMy best guess is that the edges are oriented such that at the tested frequencies they cause constructive interference inside the antenna therefore boosting the signal. The orientation is weird because that's probably the best way to make it work in all directions, if the edges were in a flat plane, the constructive interference would only work in a single direction.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI mean sure, but how do you figure out what directions and angles to bend it in? I don't know much about signals and radio and stuff, but it feels to me like this could only be achieved through trial and error until the ideal was found, which is what evolutionary arguments are designed for.
- JimDabell 1y agoThis physics experiment: > Just nothing that a human being would make, because it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess. NASA describing their antenna: > It has an unusual organic looking structure, one that expert antenna designers would not likely produce. — https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20060024675 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20060024675 The parallel seems obvious to me.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoMaybe not so much the implications. If our science is defined by symmetry, beauty, anything - and it is, because so much of physics is literally about looking for symmetries of various kinds - why are we ignoring the loud hints from ML solutions that this is a limiting heuristic?
- photonthug 1y ago> why are we ignoring the loud hints from ML solutions that this is a limiting heuristic? This comes up a lot and always strikes me as rather anti-science, even anti-rationality in general. To speed run the typical progression of this argument, someone says alchemy and astrology occasionally "work" too if you're determined to ignore the failures. This point is then shot down by a recap about the success of QM despite Einstein's objections, success of the standard model even with lots of quasi-empiricism etc, etc. Structurally though.. if you want to claim that the universe is fundamentally weird and unknowable, it's very easy to argue this, because you can always ignore the success of past theory and formalisms by saying that "it was nice while it lasted but we've squeezed all the juice out of that and are in a new regime now". Next you challenge your detractors to go ahead and produce a clean beautiful symmetric theory of everything to prove you wrong. That's just rhetoric though, and arguments from model/information/complexity theory etc about fundamental limits on what's computable and decidable and compressible would be much more satisfying and convincing. When does finding a complicated thing that works actually rule out a simpler model that you've missed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length#MDL_in_machine_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length#MDL...
- otikik 1y ago
- Biganon 1y agoGo ahead then, explain to us how the exact values of the 6 angles make it work so well
- Xorakios 1y agoHexagons for the win!