Researchers show that an iron bar is capable of decision-making

Link to journal article referenced: http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/8/083023/

After reading the original publication, the analogy to an iron bar is just confusing the point.

The article states: "Every time the outcome of a play of machine A ends in a reward, the bar moves to the left a specific distance, and every time the outcome ends in no reward, the bar moves to the right a specific distance. The same goes for a play of machine B, but the directions of the bar movements are reversed. After enough trials, the bar's total displacement reveals which slot machine offers the better winning probability." There's no locomotion reinforcement which can apply to the iron bar.

Something (either a physical mechanism or a guiding hand) needs to move the bar. Now the math of problem solving seems to still work out, but the mechanism of locomotion needs to be included in the system to get a proper description of the entropy at play.

This is really about inference, and less about "decision-making."

First, the bar is has a action-response rule-based mechanism based on the input of winning or losing combined with which direction it came from right or left. That's it.

An externality can then infer that the bar has made a decision, but of course, the bar has made no such decision.

This is still useful, but it's overblown to call this "decision-making" outside of decisions made exclusively within a strict framework of primitive rules. That said, many fundamental human reactions and decisions follow a pretty strict framework of primitive rules. That's why most people fail to grok the ladder of inference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJLqOclPqis

This feels structurally similar to Searle's "Chinese room" argument.

It's interesting, but I'm at a loss as to what's even remotely new about it. Unless the computer that you typed this on is very, very different from mine that I'm typing this on, there isn't any living components in it, yet it is "computing" and "deciding" quite a bit. There's a ton of natural processes that incorporate some feedback element and can be said without much stretching to be doing a computation. We're beyond science on that matter, we're decades if not centuries into engineering with these facts. (It's not hard to say a steam engine is "computing" parameters to keep itself running, for instance, and h

Maybe it's just my bias as a computer scientist, but I would never dream that they would find anything but what they found. Having read the paper, they're basically proposing alternate models of computations, but computer scientists have hardly been blinded by transistors; proposing alternate models is a hobby, and there's at least one large one getting a lot of study to the point that I expect everyone will just understand the acronym without my expansion, QC. We've computed with water (both macroscopic and microfluidics), mechanical machinery (i.e., cogs not transistors), chemistry, DNA, analog circuitry, and light, and I'm sure that's not a complete list. We've hypothesized computing with mechanical nanotechnology, von Neuman replicators (up to and including converting entire astronomical bodies), black holes, closed timelike curves, and the fundamental structure of spacetime itself. If this was proposed as a Master's thesis in computer science, the advisor would advise the student to do something less pedestrian.

That doesn't make this paper "bad" in some absolute sense, but I'm surprised it's publishable, since for better or worse that incorporates a certain amount of novelty in its criteria.