[HN Gopher] Is my cat Turing-complete?
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Is my cat Turing-complete?
Author : zdyn5
Score : 241 points
Date : 2021-11-24 12:40 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (belaycpp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (belaycpp.com)
| carabiner wrote:
| Why do programmers like cats so much?
| praptak wrote:
| The null hypothesis here is that everybody likes cats.
| ludamad wrote:
| Indeed. 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 wrote:
| -- 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.
| __alexs wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Warning, don't click if you need to be productive.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/crabcats
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| And if you don't like Reddit's new interface:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/crabcats/
| monkowl wrote:
| Even better: cats are not only Turing-complete but also Turing-
| complete liquids! https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/answering-
| the-question-...
| freddiecoleman wrote:
| CATs are implemented in a turing complete language called
| Chialisp https://chialisp.com/docs/puzzles/cats/
| teddyh wrote:
| Cats do not run optimal algorithms:
|
| http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-a
| rawling wrote:
| Wow, 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?"
| bitwize wrote:
| That 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.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| It'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), 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%93
| Einstein_statisti...). Dogputers have quanta which can share the
| same space, [forming a
| stack](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).
|
| 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).
| 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/Ferm
| i%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).
|
| There's more hisssstory to be told, though that's it for now!
| berkes wrote:
| > 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.
| csixty4 wrote:
| > 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.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Ahah super, bien joue la frontpage sur HN !
| s_dev wrote:
| Really did think this was the unix command 'cat' being Turing
| complete which makes sense.
| Konohamaru wrote:
| Cats aren't Turing complete because they don't have
| intentionality. Everything it was doing was a result of instinct.
| visarga wrote:
| Not much gap between instinct and intention. You could say
| instincts are default intentions selected by evolution.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So the crazy cat ladies are really hardcore compute nerds that
| are just letting their cores rest?
| d--b wrote:
| 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...
| stinos wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ineedasername wrote:
| >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
| maps 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 the putting cats
| in the mix might allow me to exceed the theoretical
| maximum of 1 bit of entropy per bit.
| kreeben wrote:
| You could also buy just two then wait a while and through some
| inexplicable magic, you'll gave 64 cores of cat.
| zwirbl wrote:
| But be aware the resulting catsplosion will grind the
| simulation to a halt at some point
| codetrotter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are these the big/little cores I've been hearing so much
| about?
| anotherevan wrote:
| There's the makings of a science fiction novel in there,
| somewhere.
| zdyn5 wrote:
| Going for the 5dm or 3dm node size?
| crate_barre wrote:
| Apple makes their own cats now days.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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)
| VLM wrote:
| There's a classic Charles Stross short story where, to
| spoil the story, some old men apparently "randomly" playing
| a board game to pass the time, are performing combinatorial
| magick to fight a demonically possessed ... well don't want
| to spoil the entire story. The background of the story is
| magick is real and based on math and computer logical
| operations and such. cstross used to post here occasionally
| and worked as a sysadmin in the olden days.
|
| Anyway, aside from fantasy/sci fi stories, the interesting
| analogy with the story is just because I'm not smart enough
| to debug the system given no blueprints or explanation,
| does not mean an anthill is not running some novel and
| possibly interesting computational problem. Or bees nest or
| giant fungal mycelia in the dirt or herds of lobsters.
|
| There are randomness detection and evaluation algos
| (distantly related to compression algos) and now that we
| have big data I suspect the next decades will have those
| algos rubbed up against big data and we'll discover
| interesting things about hive insects and what the hive is
| thinking as opposed to what individual insects are
| thinking. Or run it on dolphins or ancient human dwelling
| architecture.
| Ruthalas wrote:
| Can you share the name of that short story?
| Zircom wrote:
| Not sure of the exact short story he's referring to, but
| it must take place in his Laundry Files series
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files
|
| He also has another series which he just finished that is
| very good as well about a family with the ability to step
| between diffrent timelines that's an interesting
| deconstruction of the trope.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_Princes
|
| ******** _Spoilers*******
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| While it starts as starts as a fantasy series, it
| eventually comes out their magic abilities are remnants
| of advanced nanotech from an interdimensional empire.
| Apparently a publisher he didn't like working with had
| the rights to his next Scifi series, so he had to start
| it as fantasy to get around the contract._
| _jal wrote:
| > 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There are several Youtube channels where people gradually
| train cats and dogs to use boards full of buttons (20+
| buttons in some cases) to communicate their wants. It
| definitely seems to work in general but doesn't make the
| animals any less themselves... one of the funnier examples
| being a video of a cat repeatedly pressing the "outside"
| button, staring at a yard full of snow, and then stalking
| back and pressing the "mad" button several times. Simple
| compound phrases (for example, "play friend" or "love
| grandma") are fairly common, but any kind of actual syntax is
| basically nonexistent.
| thechao wrote:
| All of the videos of these kinds I've seen were clearly
| fake.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Here's one example:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGMTesZlKa0Lokb7ZNqOJXQ
|
| And another:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ
| 0xFFFE wrote:
| Do these cat-cores need cryogenic cooling?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Does it have an infinite tape?
| marcodiego wrote:
| The 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.
| apricot13 wrote:
| genuinely thought the last line in this was going to be and
| then I found a wasps nest in the room next door!
| YeezyMode wrote:
| You may have already, but you'd enjoy reading 'Conscious Mind
| Resonant Brain' by Stephen Grossberg.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Thanks for the hint/tip/advice. Never heard about it. Hope
| you found my tone similar or with some close ideas.
| jaclaz wrote:
| What if I told you it wasn't the same wasp?
|
| One wasp trasmitted a map of your house to another and another
| one!
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Maybe it spoke with the same accent
| praptak wrote:
| It had a red mohawk.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Your comment may sound like a joke but bees are known to
| transmit direction and distance to one another and are also
| able to solve complex problems:
| https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/bees-beat-
| computers-ability-solve-complex-math-problem/
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yep, it was intended as a joke, halfway between a citation
| of The Matrix and the known joke about the Scottish black
| sheep: https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/3.htm
|
| Of course bees can communicate between them, and probably
| also wasps.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm a beekeeper, and one of the most profounding things to
| show people when they (anctously) look over my shoulder is
| this "bee waggle".
|
| It is clear and easy to see, (easier than that d* b* of a
| queen when you need her, most often), and it tells a lot
| about the cognitive abilities of a social group, the hive.
| How they can tell eachother complex directions by twerking.
|
| Kids love it too. And will often play around, wiggling
| their behinds (a cousin called it bee-twerking) and
| giggling how they are showing eachother where the sweets
| are by dancing.
| not2b wrote:
| The wasp might be using smell to figure out the way into your
| house; any odor would come out of any open window.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| It might be using A* then :P
| marcodiego wrote:
| Exactly! The intensity of the smell is a perfectly fine
| consistent heuristic.
| [deleted]
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Was it a paper wasp? They are so cute and friendly.
|
| This little one didn't mind a bit when I put my macro lens an
| inch or two away, and even did some tricks to show off!
|
| https://geary.smugmug.com/Macro/i-VsCPgMS/A
|
| https://geary.smugmug.com/Macro/i-3xN7pMk/A
| marcodiego wrote:
| Can't tell, but looks similar.
| praptak wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| There 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.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Cats are a superset of Turing completeness. Cats are "undefined
| behaviour"
| https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112
| rob74 wrote:
| > _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.
| sdoering wrote:
| Thank 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.)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Chaos Cat - the final QA tester. Ensure that your service can
| survive it.
| rob74 wrote:
| Chaos Cat, a.k.a. the fluffy fuzzer...
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| Chaos engineering is a thing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
| peanut_worm wrote:
| I tried to repeat this experiment and my cat had a Segmentation
| Fault
| stinos wrote:
| You mean an undefined period of Sleep()?
| deusum wrote:
| You can expect a core dump.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Only if a sandbox is available for that routine
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-11-24 23:01 UTC)