Whelp, that's completely unreadable to me. Undergraduate computer science fail.
I got as far as "the model of this physical process of entropy can act as a search function for lower entropic states, which given some poking, can resemble problem solution states".
It's the poking part that is problematic.
>To better understand this classical-thermal form (11) of causal entropic forcingwe simulated its effect [12,13] on the evolution of the causal macrostates of a variety of simple mechanical systems: (i) a particle in a box, (ii) a cart and pole system, (iii) a tool use puzzle, and (iv) a social cooperation puzzle
I am wildly unqualified to comment on this paper, but it's suspicious that you would jump to a "tool use puzzle" and a "social cooperation puzzle". It yields a really fun result and a fun way of talking about cognition, but it seems unsurprising to say that once you describe a problem in the physical terms of this framework, your framework can then solve the problem, as in,
>We modeled an animal as a disk (disk I) undergoing causal entropic forcing, a potential tool
as a smaller disk (disk II) outside of a tube too narrow for disk I to enter, and an object of interest as a second smaller disk (disk III) resting inside the tube
The notion that currently understood physical models can act as a learning system, given the right parameters, is really cool and exciting, and there's a great simplicity and metaphoric appeal to it.
phill, this is hacker news, and if someone finds you're wildly unqualified to comment on something, don't worry, he'll be vocal about it and explain exactly why he thinks you're unqualified to comment about it. That's why I love this site. On any similar site aggregator, I'd get cat pictures and people telling me my opinions are stupid because my face is stupid.
More towards the topic, I'd say these kind of articles have to be taken with a grain of something, preferably salt or cynism, depending on taste. I'm usually more of a material science/electronics technology buff, and news articles in that area will not hestitate to present a relatively minor paper as a breakthrough in battery technology that will solve all our energy problems in the next 5 years. But then you read on, compare it against the existing technologies and you realize that they just did something funny to the diodes that increases power density at the cost of usuage time. Somewhat handy in some applications, but not a game changer.
