I was also a bit disappointed at how many commenters focused on the AI angle. Not that it necessarily matters, but to me, this isn’t a story about AI. (I threw in the last two paragraphs because I wasn’t sure how to end it in a way that “felt like an ending.”)
To me, this story is an excuse for an exploration about how concepts work (inspired by an exchange with John Wentworth on “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”). The story-device itself is basically a retread of “That Alien Message”/”Starwink”, but for a simpler problem worked out in more detail. In my initial brainstorming, I was imagining a human waking up in a room, confronted with this puzzle. By the time I started writing, I changed the protagonist to be an AI unaware of its nature, because I couldn’t think of a plausible reason for a human to be in the situation of needing to decode raw pixel arrays.
(Self-review.)
I was surprised by how well-received this was!
I was also a bit disappointed at how many commenters focused on the AI angle. Not that it necessarily matters, but to me, this isn’t a story about AI. (I threw in the last two paragraphs because I wasn’t sure how to end it in a way that “felt like an ending.”)
To me, this story is an excuse for an exploration about how concepts work (inspired by an exchange with John Wentworth on “Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception”). The story-device itself is basically a retread of “That Alien Message”/”Starwink”, but for a simpler problem worked out in more detail. In my initial brainstorming, I was imagining a human waking up in a room, confronted with this puzzle. By the time I started writing, I changed the protagonist to be an AI unaware of its nature, because I couldn’t think of a plausible reason for a human to be in the situation of needing to decode raw pixel arrays.
For previous computational philosophy posts, I took care to polish my code and link to it when it wasn’t fully included in the post, but in this case, I didn’t bother: I had of course written code to generate colored-shape images and corresponding integer sequences, but it’s so sloppy that I was embarrassed to link it when finally finishing up the story and pushing it out the door for Halloween, having already done most of the work months earlier. Did anyone miss the code, or was that an OK decision?