Work

Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem’s Brain

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: A "quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings. This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how—and why—we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.

Source: ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward!)

DOI: 10.1145/3759429.3762631

Authors: Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms

Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research