Thought experiment: “Intelligence Bootstrap”

Thought experiment: if an LLM were connected to a machine that could print chips and it were told to print two ASICs: a VHDL interpreter and a chip encoding some form of genetic algorithm. The first chip then tests out VHDL from the genetic algorithm on the machine that printed the first chips. Say the chips are all FPGAs so there’s minimal wastage. The ‘goal’ of the genetic algorithm could be, say, to reliably create configurable hardware to write news articles. The fitness feedback would be from the LLM, where it all started…

…could that qualify as a nano-intelligence explosion? Call it an intelligence ‘pop’, perhaps. Or an ‘intelligence bootstrap’? That is, in the context of writing news articles.

Note that ‘the goal’ could be literally anything, all defined by some fitness criteria. What if the goal was ‘to survive’ or ‘to learn’? Would those be too broad to be defined by the fitness criteria?

Also note that ‘configurable hardware’ is, in effect, a marriage of hardware and software. The choice of VHDL over any other HDL is arbitrary.

Final note: all of these components already exist. The only real practical variable is the goal / fitness criteria. There’s only one or two steps beyond this to what one might call ‘Goal oriented adaptive mimicry’.

Note to self: must read ‘The Emperor’s New Mind’

Pokemon Cobol -> day 0

Sitting in Bridge Street Coffee in Chester, UK as a family bereavement takes place, I met a chef who was also a software developer. He mentioned, off hand, Pokemon and then mentioned, off hand, COBOL, that most business oriented of programming languages.

It is not necessarily my business to create a Pokemon Go clone using COBOL as an ASCII art graphics driver, HTTP backend and hopefully a whole bunch of other things that the committee never intended it to be used for.

But also, why not?

This will hopefully be the first in a series of sporadic posts about my journeys into learning COBOL and harnessing its power to create a janky version of the most popular game of 2016.

https://pokemoncobol.com

[at the moment there’s a 302 set up to redirect back here. That will change!]

It shall be FOSS, of course:

https://github.com/InBrewJ/pokemonco-bol

I choose you!

Jason’s Applied Spectrum of Ned

There’s a thing about recursive acronyms in the world of tech / software / general nerd-ery. Think GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) and PHP (PHP: Hypertext Processor).

Or should I say general Ned-ery?

At my current place of work, feedback is very important to the team. We distribute feedback forms each half year in order to grow, collaborate and also gather useful data on our own personal pros and cons.

Since it’s also a super fun team, the feedback forms are entirely free(form); we’re at liberty to inject any form of nonsense that we choose.

I give you “Jason’s Applied Spectrum of Ned,” or “JASON”. I’ve been waiting for a good long while until my first recursive acronym presented itself. Maybe the next one will be the name of a library or something. Maybe not. Maybe I should just call it a day:

It’s a comical way to gauge how effective you are as a software engineer / developer / code monkey / software person in general. It might be applicable elsewhere, too. I’m a particular fan of the ambiguity of ‘WTF NED’.

Any copyrights belong to whoever makes The Simpsons, which might still be Fox and Matt Groening. Ned Flanders is absolutely not of my own creation. Any money that you make from JASON should probably to donated directly to the First Church of Springfield.