I'm sure you could train dogs, monkeys, or parrots to reasonably reliably perform logical operations. From that you could build a simple processor, but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much. It's not so much getting them to do the tasks, it's getting them all to reliably do them at the same time in synchronisation.
Of course as with the guy in the Chinese Room that doesn't speak Chinese, none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing.
There's a classic Charles Stross short story where, to spoil the story, some old men apparently "randomly" playing a board game to pass the time, are performing combinatorial magick to fight a demonically possessed ... well don't want to spoil the entire story. The background of the story is magick is real and based on math and computer logical operations and such. cstross used to post here occasionally and worked as a sysadmin in the olden days.
Anyway, aside from fantasy/sci fi stories, the interesting analogy with the story is just because I'm not smart enough to debug the system given no blueprints or explanation, does not mean an anthill is not running some novel and possibly interesting computational problem. Or bees nest or giant fungal mycelia in the dirt or herds of lobsters.
There are randomness detection and evaluation algos (distantly related to compression algos) and now that we have big data I suspect the next decades will have those algos rubbed up against big data and we'll discover interesting things about hive insects and what the hive is thinking as opposed to what individual insects are thinking. Or run it on dolphins or ancient human dwelling architecture.
And it was an "IBM 1602" although pretty obviously based very closely on the actual 1620.
The real world 1620 was a 50s era RTL scientific computer (IBM used to separate math processors from business processors, until the famous "360" that did everything pretty well). This used the SMS style hardware cards that everything IBM made used until the 360-era SLT cards. Each SMS card holds enough circuits to be roughly one 7400 series TTL chip.
He also has another series which he just finished that is very good as well about a family with the ability to step between diffrent timelines that's an interesting deconstruction of the trope.
While it starts as starts as a fantasy series, it eventually comes out their magic abilities are remnants of advanced nanotech from an interdimensional empire. Apparently a publisher he didn't like working with had the rights to his next Scifi series, so he had to start it as fantasy to get around the contract.
but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much
That just means you need a redundant array of parrots operating in parallel, with a regulator to detect different answers to the same problem and retry.
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I'm sure you could train dogs, monkeys, or parrots to reasonably reliably perform logical operations. From that you could build a simple processor, but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much. It's not so much getting them to do the tasks, it's getting them all to reliably do them at the same time in synchronisation.
Of course as with the guy in the Chinese Room that doesn't speak Chinese, none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing.
There's a classic Charles Stross short story where, to spoil the story, some old men apparently "randomly" playing a board game to pass the time, are performing combinatorial magick to fight a demonically possessed ... well don't want to spoil the entire story. The background of the story is magick is real and based on math and computer logical operations and such. cstross used to post here occasionally and worked as a sysadmin in the olden days.
Anyway, aside from fantasy/sci fi stories, the interesting analogy with the story is just because I'm not smart enough to debug the system given no blueprints or explanation, does not mean an anthill is not running some novel and possibly interesting computational problem. Or bees nest or giant fungal mycelia in the dirt or herds of lobsters.
There are randomness detection and evaluation algos (distantly related to compression algos) and now that we have big data I suspect the next decades will have those algos rubbed up against big data and we'll discover interesting things about hive insects and what the hive is thinking as opposed to what individual insects are thinking. Or run it on dolphins or ancient human dwelling architecture.
Can you share the name of that short story?
Found it: "Down on the farm"
https://www.tor.com/2008/07/20/down-on-the-farm/
And it was an "IBM 1602" although pretty obviously based very closely on the actual 1620.
The real world 1620 was a 50s era RTL scientific computer (IBM used to separate math processors from business processors, until the famous "360" that did everything pretty well). This used the SMS style hardware cards that everything IBM made used until the 360-era SLT cards. Each SMS card holds enough circuits to be roughly one 7400 series TTL chip.
Not sure of the exact short story he's referring to, but it must take place in his Laundry Files series
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files
He also has another series which he just finished that is very good as well about a family with the ability to step between diffrent timelines that's an interesting deconstruction of the trope.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_Princes
********Spoilers*******
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While it starts as starts as a fantasy series, it eventually comes out their magic abilities are remnants of advanced nanotech from an interdimensional empire. Apparently a publisher he didn't like working with had the rights to his next Scifi series, so he had to start it as fantasy to get around the contract.
Strike "animals" out, and it sounds like any worker in a big enough org. (Maybe I should stop reading Kafka)
That just means you need a redundant array of parrots operating in parallel, with a regulator to detect different answers to the same problem and retry.