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I am doing an internship in the lab where the cited paper was produced right now :-D If anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer or relay(maybe tomorrow though as it is late here). There also was a related discussion about 2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16894818
Could I get a copy of the pre-print?
Hacking possibilities increase if even simple devices turn out to be Turing Complete. "Help, my flashlight emptied my bank account!"
It's not hard to find "simple" devices that are turing complete, 2d cellular automata (with the correct rule) are turring complete for example and they are incredibly simple.
This is related to a notion Wolfram has been exploring and trying to explain for some time, which is that contrary to our previous beliefs (or most people's current beliefs especially the engineers perspective), complex devices are not needed to produce complex behaviour, in nature it is very common for simple systems to produce complex behaviour, including the ability of simple systems to compute... to the point that often these systems look like random noise might have been introduced, but in fact they are completely deterministic (think systems exploited by PRNGs).
Hacking possibilities increase if even simple devices turn out to be Turing Complete. "Help, my flashlight emptied my bank account!"
> if even simple devices turn out to be Turing Complete It's not hard to find "simple" devices that are turing complete, 2d cellular automata (with the correct rule) are turring complete for example and they are incredibly simple. This is related to a notion Wolfram has been exploring and trying to explain for some time, which is that contrary to our previous beliefs (or most people's current beliefs especially the e…
I'm reminded of another recent HN thread about the "intelligence" of single living cells. Whether or not you think they are actually "intelligent", they are clearly capable of complex behavior without being governed by rigid parameters and yet are obviously molecular machines that seem tantalizingly close to being analyzable by humans.