The Chaostron: An Important Advance in Learning Machines (1961) | Hacker News Reader

The Chaostron: An Important Advance in Learning Machines (1961)

dl.acm.org

1,487 pointsabrax314119 comments

How does this post have so many points (350+ right now), yet no comments?

That is weird. I opened this thread because I saw one comment and 630 upvotes, which seemed off. Makes sense though that the one comment was noting the weird ratio.

It might be a bot network upvoting this, but I'm not sure what motive there is in setting your bot network on upvoting a CS paper from 60 years ago.

EDIT: I'm guessing it's a repost from the second-chance pool. hn.algolia.com shows this as having been posted 3 days ago.

> It might be a bot network upvoting this, but I'm not sure what motive there is in setting your bot network on upvoting a CS paper from 60 years ago

A demonstration that it works

people loving the idea and upvoting before reading the text (they are still reading) or people intrigued and upvoting in the hope that someone else read and then summarizes the text?

feels unlikely that 900 people are upvoting while reading and that it takes ~1 hour per page...

It is still very weird. The ratio of upvotes and comments is way off for posts that are upvoted like that. Also with this amount of votes it’s starting to be one of the highlights of the last 6 month maybe the year…

1,400+ points now. and climbing. 8 comments... fishy for sure

Maybe someone demoed bot farm?

Because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255477

The paper is surreal.

An AI paper that starts with experiments on drowning cats and religious chimpanzees.

Then it talks about making the system by cutting up a large wire mesh and assembling it back randomly.

Then it talks about simulating the system on a computer, and coding it in a programming language called YAWN that is like English.

Then it says that they could not obtain the machine that runs YAWN programs, so they emulated that machine on another computer (IBM 704).

Then it says (excitedly) that the machine printed gibberish when presented with a certain input and on another run ejected the input punched card twice.

I'm not sure if this is real or a joke.

I'm not sure if the experiment itself was designed as a joke to waste US military's computer time.

I'm not sure if this has some deep lessons.

To me, it felt like when Dumbledore set the chicken on fire in HPMOR.

Paper from April 1984 reporting results from 1961? ...

I got to the end of the paper before I noticed that it was published in the April issue of Communications of the ACM. I have a hard time believing that this is not an April Fool's Day joke.

I provide as evidence this line from near the end of the paper: "Thanks are due ... to Mr. V. A. Vyssotsky for manually simulating the 704 simulating STRETCH simulating Chaostron"

The 704 was a vacuum tube machine (predecessor of the 709 and later on the transistorized 7040/7090 series). STRETCH (IBM 7030) was a vastly faster system (of which about 30 total were sold, hence the difficulty of getting one for this project). Simulating a STRETCH on a 704 would be ghastly. I have no idea what the effect of doing this manually would have been on Mr Vyssotsky.

Vyssotsky later achieved some notoriety as the technical lead on an obscure project called Multics.

Pretty nice satire once you realize it's a joke. My favorite quote is definitely "(where by curiosity," of course, we do not mean to imply that anthropomorphic categories or judgements should be applied to machines, but merely that the machines have a desire to learn).

Looks like someone is testing their HN upvote farm...

https://reverseengineeringtogether.wordpress.com/2022/10/18/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255477

OP here. Not my bot net, not my bots! (Do I get the karma anyway since I was the one attacked? :-)

Up voted by a bot net, but still part of the 'Best' list ;-)

Anyway, I enjoyed reading about Chaostron, even if it might have more up votes than it would have without the bot net.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com