Swarms of soldier crabs can implement logical gates (2012)

[ineedasername]

This is the clear replacement for computational resources when the EMP apocalypse that so much fiction predicts finally comes about.

There will be accelerated breading programs selecting for ever smaller & smaller crab sizes, and while Intel is stuck trying to perfect 10 centimeter crabs, TSMC will be creating cutting-edge football field sized processors running on 3 centimeter crabs.

Garbage collection in code will take on a whole new meaning as dead crabs are aggressively removed and repurposed into the local food supply, while protestors picket TSMC because the edible crab meat from 3cm crabs is miniscule & uneconomical to extract.

Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.

[__blockcipher__]

Hilarious comment. But this is HN so I have to nitpick the minor flaws I noticed:

> Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.

(1) Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained.

(2) Fun fact, BTC tx fees already spiked high years back, during the bitcoin civil war. The day I had to pay an $80 transaction fee was the day I dumped BTC and never looked back. The tx fees were not due to some true technical limitation but rather an artificially imposed constraint when BTC got taken over from within by a faction that wrested control of /r/bitcoin and censored all dissent, convincing the unending hordes of speculators that the block size was a holy constant that could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”. Just a fun bit of history that felt relevant.

[dwohnitmok]

> Ethical note: No specific license was required for this work. The duration of any single experiment was so short that each crab never reached dangerous level, that the crabs were kept in comfortable condition, and that after all experiments the crabs were released to their natural habitats. Furthermore, on visual inspection,no crabs appeared to have been injured or adversely affected by the experiments.

The way this ethical note is phrased seems to suggest the experimenters basically went to the beach and picked up a bunch of crabs and then released them again, as opposed to any sort of standardized procurement process, which I find amusing.

[dalbasal]

It makes me imagine the experiment taking place in a sand hole that they dug on saturday morning.

[ineedasername]

It's particularly amusing given that, once the experiment was done, it would have been perfectly acceptable to toss them all into a boiling pot of water at a local restaurant.

As a matter of fact, loosely construed, that might be what they means by "natural habitat"

[teruakohatu]

I wish we would get to see more negitive result papers. I would love to read a paper entitled:

"Logic Gates Can't Be Implemented by Wombats"

[gwern]

How would one prove that? It's easy to show crabs can make logic gates - just do it. How would you prove wombats can't ever implement logic gates? Maybe you just used the wrong treats, and peanut butter snacks would make them motivated enough to train.

[ineedasername]

"Mashed potatoes at 5 degrees Kelvin Still not Effective Superconductors"

[andrewl]

I would also be interested in a paper titled:

Logic Gates Can Be Implemented by Wombats

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Is that how the scientific method works. Proving a negative. (Impossible.) Or is it aimed at "disproving a positive".

[yablak]

Didn't I read about this in The Three-Body Problem?

[u02sgb]

Think my first experience of this was Adrian Tchaikovsky. May not have been first though.

[jevgeni]

Let’s just give them crabs different colored flags

[nixass]

My first thought exactly

[dr_dshiv]

What's more complex: the logical gate made of crabs or an individual crab? What's more complex, a corporation or a person? A worm or a single cell in a worm?

[jrochkind1]

It would take an AWFUL lot of crabs acting as logic gates to model a crab brain or an entire crab. A single logic gate by itself is clearly less complex than a soldier crab.

But if you really could model a crab brain perfectly in a turing machine (not clear you can), then let's make a crab brain out of crab logic gates, and then use those mega-crab-brains to make more mega logic gates, and put together a bunch of those to... you'd probably run out of crabs.

[ZeroFries]

The law of large numbers let's you abstract in such a way that the group can appear simpler than the individual unit. Of course, to fully simulate it across every single possible scenario, one would need to model all the individual units in order to accurately model the group, and so technically the group is more complex to fully model.

[eutectic]

Unclear if question is genuine, but I would say that each level is capable of performing computations (and/or acting in the world) in ways which are inaccessible to other layers.

I know saying 'things are hard' is an obvious conclusion, but that doesn't make it wrong!

[chrisweekly]

Title reminds me of a criminally under-appreciated work of sci-fi: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

[Loranubi]

Also of the flag-raising army computer in 'The Dark Forest' by 'Liu Cixin'.

[seanalexander]

What a wonderful instance of carcinisation! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

[nwallin]

'Soldier crab' is a name attached to several unrelated crustaceans. The crustaceans studied in the paper are a variety of soldier crabs that are, in fact, true crabs.

[saagarjha]

Not sure I'm seeing the crustacean evolution here.

[dormento]

Yep. Given enough time, even logic gates will converge into crabs :)

[mrec]

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws
  Just executing chores on damp PCs.

[anonymousiam]

Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26494871

[trav4225]

Yes, but can I play Doom on it?

[loh]

If you had approximately 16,039,018,500 crabs, yes.

[bfirsh]

Here's an HTML version: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1204.1749/

[dormento]

I clicked the link without even looking at the url, hoping for maybe an HTML5 version of the logic gates where you could play with the number of crabs and see a real time simulation of the resulting logic gate.

I don't know why I expected that.

[thret]

I just want to point out that humans also swarm effectively. Especially at protests or when there are fires nearby.

[makerofthings]

Ants are used for computation in "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Really good story.

[hoppla]

Now they need to add waves and connect it to the CLK pin. Tidal waves can serve as RST

[stakkur]

The ultimate offshore team.

[vishnugupta]

The next logical step is to check for Turing completeness.

[gfaure]

This was published so close to April Fools' Day that I can't decide whether this is for real...

[cheese_van]

I click my claws therefore I am.