
Researchers show that an iron bar is capable of decision-making - sfrechtling
http://phys.org/news/2015-08-iron-bar-capable-decision-making.html
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benjohnson
I hope someone can provide a deeper indication to what is going on - on first
reading it looks like the iron bar is simply recording past events. The
observer would be the one who decides to use this information to extrapolate
into future events - the iron bar just sitting there.

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JorgeGT
Exactly this, the bar doesn't move towards the machines by itself, its just a
tool a sentient being is using to record data. Isn't the proposition analogous
to proposing that a typewriter is able to compose a novel or that a violin is
capable of playing a song? Neither the violin, the typewriter nor the iron bar
work without a sentient human using them.

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DannoHung
It's a weird analogy, but it makes sense in the context of the paper's
authors' statement:

> "The most important implication that we wish to claim is that the proposed
> scheme will provide a new perspective for understanding the information-
> processing principles of certain lower forms of life," Kim, from the
> International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics' National Institute
> for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, told Phys.org. "These
> lower lifeforms exploit their underlying physics without needing any
> sophisticated neural systems."

~~~
bhz
Iron Bar for President!

I think it's a very weird analogy, and a terrible title for an article on
phys.org.

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subliminalzen
I heard that on Facebook, more people "liked" a pickle than the band
Nickleback. So maybe an iron bar for President isn't so far fetched...

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nanocyber
The decision is still made by the human evaluator(s). (Presumably, to declare
one slot machine the "easiest".)

Terrible headline.

Are they even suggesting that the bar is somehow affected by the output of
(perhaps) coins from the slot machine... electromagnetic interactions? Or is
the slot machine example simply a thought experiment? I suspect we may be
attempting to process bad input here...

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nanocyber
I read the article again. The researchers simply seem to be saying that what
seem like complex decisions can be made in simple organisms as long as the
ability to increment a "counter" when a certain condition occurs is possible.
The slot machine example actually requires a "counter" that can increase and
decrease when opposing conditions occur. This seems very obvious...

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78666cdc
It is obvious. We call them machines.

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earlz
Is this a thought experiment or something, or an early April fool's joke?

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danharaj
Instead of 'decision-making', they could have said 'computation'. Does that
make it less ridiculous? I think it's a little interesting.

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jerf
It's interesting, but I'm at a loss as to what's even remotely _new_ about it.
Unless the computer that you typed this on is very, very different from mine
that I'm typing this on, there isn't any living components in it, yet it is
"computing" and "deciding" quite a bit. There's a ton of natural processes
that incorporate some feedback element and can be said without much stretching
to be doing a computation. We're beyond science on that matter, we're decades
if not centuries into engineering with these facts. (It's not hard to say a
steam engine is "computing" parameters to keep itself running, for instance,
and h

Maybe it's just my bias as a computer scientist, but I would never dream that
they would find anything but what they found. Having read the paper, they're
basically proposing alternate models of computations, but computer scientists
have hardly been blinded by transistors; proposing alternate models is a
hobby, and there's at least one large one getting a lot of study to the point
that I expect everyone will just understand the acronym without my expansion,
QC. We've computed with water (both macroscopic and microfluidics), mechanical
machinery (i.e., cogs not transistors), chemistry, DNA, analog circuitry, and
light, and I'm sure that's not a complete list. We've hypothesized computing
with mechanical nanotechnology, von Neuman replicators (up to and including
converting entire astronomical bodies), black holes, closed timelike curves,
and the fundamental structure of spacetime itself. If this was proposed as a
Master's thesis in computer science, the advisor would advise the student to
do something less pedestrian.

That doesn't make this paper "bad" in some absolute sense, but I'm surprised
it's _publishable_ , since for better or worse that incorporates a certain
amount of novelty in its criteria.

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zeidrich
Science is composition.

We build a bit, we test, if it's solid, we build a bit more. We don't need to
come up with hypothetical black hole computers.

The paper and the concept of TOW dynamics has been referenced in
[http://www.nature.com/articles/srep13253](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep13253)
which shares one of the authors and is interesting in a different way.

I get tired of people saying things that aren't exciting enough shouldn't be
published. It's not the exciting things that make the breakthroughs, it's
understanding a bit more about the things we've always figured are obvious. To
me this is more interesting than some hypothetical black hole computer. Sure
it's not blowing me away.

It's just a block. A little block. Other ideas can choose to use that block or
not. I haven't seen that system of tug-of-war dynamics described before. It
seems solid, so why not describe it?

Or does it need to be antimatter hoverboards to be worth publishing?

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jerf
Read my post more carefully before leaping to conclusions, please. You appear
to have been blinded by some words and failed to read through them properly.
You're trying to lecture me about how science works, when in fact you're the
one who is being quite wrong about it. Especially re-read my last sentence,
carefully.

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rubidium
After reading the original publication, the analogy to an iron bar is just
confusing the point.

The article states: "Every time the outcome of a play of machine A ends in a
reward, the bar moves to the left a specific distance, and every time the
outcome ends in no reward, the bar moves to the right a specific distance. The
same goes for a play of machine B, but the directions of the bar movements are
reversed. After enough trials, the bar's total displacement reveals which slot
machine offers the better winning probability." There's no locomotion
reinforcement which can apply to the iron bar.

Something (either a physical mechanism or a guiding hand) needs to move the
bar. Now the math of problem solving seems to still work out, but the
mechanism of locomotion needs to be included in the system to get a proper
description of the entropy at play.

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huxley
Not to be too thick but wouldn't it seem like a banal point if instead of
"iron bar" we were to say "measurement dial" and instead of "specific
distance" we say "number of units on dial" and if instead of "left" or "right"
we said "positive" or "negative".

So if we then say "after enough trials, the measurement dial's positive or
negative reading tells us which slot machine offers the better winning
probability", would that still seem like something worth publishing a paper
on?

Or have I just totally missed the point?

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doragcoder
Next up, digital arrows next to headlines is capable of decision-making
(removing physicality).

I'm sorry but this sounds more like a way of measurements and calculations
than actual decision-making, as that's been decided by the maker or user of
the object.

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ombudsperson
Analog computing by ascribing meaning to motion, and cognizant of directions
(in this case); while the bar may be 'just sitting there', an embedded device
within, imbued with a human way ('intelligence') of 'reasoning' about lateral
movements would be able to support decision making. Take another analogous
case of a twig moving in a brook: the twig doesn't 'need to know' the
parameters of water flow in a brook as humans do, to determine which way to
turn and tumble as it meanders through the water; it need not care about
'calculations' of water pressure, the topology of the ground beneath,
obstructions in its path, spin induced by local eddy currents and what not to
merrily cruise along; from a human perspective, an immense amount of
computation (should) be involved. Yet, as the water rolls along, equations of
continuity needn't be solved, no moments need be calculated, as pure physical
properties and forces do the trick. Lot to learn from analog computing:
digital computing is after all, a subset of it at the electronic level, could
one say? :-)

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davidu
This is really about inference, and less about "decision-making."

First, the bar is has a action-response rule-based mechanism based on the
input of winning or losing combined with which direction it came from right or
left. That's it.

An externality can then _infer_ that the bar has made a decision, but of
course, the bar has made no such decision.

This is still useful, but it's overblown to call this "decision-making"
outside of decisions made exclusively within a strict framework of primitive
rules. That said, many fundamental human reactions and decisions follow a
pretty strict framework of primitive rules. That's why most people fail to
grok the ladder of inference:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJLqOclPqis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJLqOclPqis)

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danbruc
Add a couple more iron bars and you may recreate the 1938 Zuse Z1 [1]. Not
sure what's the news here.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_\(computer\))

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sfrechtling
Link to journal article referenced:
[http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/8/083023/](http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/8/083023/)

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mring33621
So, basically, a small set of rules for keeping score over time works?

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Phemist
The simplest Braitenberg machine to date?

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davidw
tl;dr: the iron bar prefers the taste of Coke to Pepsi, and wants to "make
America great again".

~~~
mjklin
Aw, they were about to show a close-up of the bar!

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nkrisc
Reading the article, it appears to me the researchers are talking about
harnessing physical fluctuations in a process to achieve an outcome similar to
some sort of computational modeling of the same process.

I don't think they're literally saying the iron bar is making a decision, and
I'm a little surprised that would have flown over the heads of most of the
readers here.

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gpvos
Yeah, but that is what the title says (that the iron bar is making a
decision). It seems like the title is completely out of whack with the
contents of the article.

~~~
nkrisc
I totally agree. However I would hope most people can see past a poorly worded
title.

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TeeWEE
I really dont understand this...

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dalke
This feels structurally similar to Searle's "Chinese room" argument.

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KingMob
True, but simpler in scope. Searle's Chinese Room is paradoxical because it
involves trying to combine mechanical processes (of rote symbol-copying) with
supposedly higher-order thinking (speech/understanding).

But the "decision-making" here is dubious. If Searle had written an "Iron Bar
Gambling Room" argument, I bet most people would have rejected the notion that
the room was "deciding" anything. This is little different from light-
sensitive cells in primitive eyespots accumulating energy from photons to
"decide" the direction of the sun.

In short, this paper is what happens when people chase the Minimum Publishable
Unit for their career.

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moron4hire
This is just called Trend Following.

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hbogert
so, side channel analysis? Or am I missing the point?

