91
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
91 points (81.8% liked)
Technology
60319 readers
2846 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This isn’t exactly new. I heard a few years ago about a situation where the ai had these wires on the chip that should not do anything as they didn’t go anywhere , but if they removed it the chip stopped working correctly.
Flashback to the 1960s, Magic and More Magic
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
That was a different technique, using simulated evolution in an FPGA.
An algorithm would create a series of random circuit designs, program the FPGA with them, then evaluate how well each one accomplished a task. It would then take the best design, create a series of random variations on it, and select the best one. Rinse and repeat until the circuit is really good at performing the task.
I think this is what I am thinking of. Kind of a predecessor of modern machine learning.
It is a form of machine learning
I don’t know about AI involvement but this story in general is very very old.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
I thought of this as well. In fact, as a bit of fun I added a switch to a rack at our lab in a similar way with the same labels. This one though does nothing, but people did push the "turbo" button on old pc boxes despite how often those buttons weren't connected.
Some weren't connected? For most PCs that had it, it was a real thing, though counterintuitive and marketing-speak, because enabling "turbo" was just normal speed and disabling would run in a slower mode for compatibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
After the 486, there were pentiums built at shops that still used 486 cases. In my experience the button wasn't plugged in.
My turbo button was connected to an LED but that was it
I remember that as well.
Edit; moved comment to correct reply.
Yeah, I've stumbled upon that one a while back too, probably. Was it also the one where the initial designs would refuse to work outside the room temperature 'til the ai was asked to take temps into account?
Sounds like RF reflection used like a data capacitor or something.
The particular example was getting clock-like behavior without a clock. It had an incomplete circuit that used RF reflection or something very similar to simulate a clock. Of course, removing this dead-end circuit broke the design.
I remember this too, it was years and years ago (I almost want to say 2010-2015). Can't find anything searching for it
You helped me narrow it down. I expect Adrian Thompson's research from the 90s, referenced in this Wikipedia article is what you're thinking of.
Yes! Exactly this thank you
(I should have gone with my gut, I knew it was ages ago. 30ish years by the sound of it!)
Perhaps you're an AI who only hallucinated a circuit design.
:)
It's been found. Adrian Thompson's research from almost 30 years ago..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware