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Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM activations — AI Alignment Forum

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[Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html.] Exploring the ruins of an alien civilization, you find what appears to be a working computer——it's made of plastic and metal, wires connect it to various devices, and you see arrays of capacitors that maintain charged or uncharged states and that sometimes rapidly toggle in response to voltages from connected wires. You can tell that the presumptive RAM is activating in complex but structured patterns, but you don't know their meanings. What strategies can you use to come to understand what the underlying order is, what algorithm the computer is running, that explains the pattern of RAM activations? Thanks to Joss Oliver (SPAR) for entertaining a version of this koan. Many of B's ideas come from Joss. Red: If we want to understand how minds work, the only source of real data is our own thinking, starting from the language in which we think. Blue: That doesn't seem right. A big

x Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM activations — AI Alignment Forum AI Frontpage 21 Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM activations by TsviBT 5th Apr 2024 25 min read 10 21 [Metadata: crossposted from https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2024/04/koan-divining-alien-datastructures-from.html .] Exploring the ruins of an alien civilization, you find what appears to be a working computer——it's made of plastic and metal, wires connect it to various devices, and you see arrays of capacitors that maintain charged or uncharged states and that sometimes rapidly toggle in response to voltage

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