TechTakes

While doing research on our friends, I found (a disowned Reddit comment which found) another banger from the guy who pointed out that pinball is too chaotic for superintelligences to predict (discussed previously, on Awful): whole-bird emulation requires quantum mechanics, or "WBE requires QM" for short. Apparently WBE was a minor meme inside the community at some point, but I'm not sure who first noticed the situation. In short, birds with certain chemicals in their eyes may have the ability to sense magnetic fields due to QM effects. (I'd normally recommend WP on this, but the relevant article is bizarrely skeptical about the situation, although it does include a decent diagram.) As such, our friends consider the possibility that their vaunted superintelligence tasks (ancestor simulations, Newcomb predictors, etc.) are harder than WBE, which itself is much harder than e.g. cracking classical cryptography with Shor's algorithm or some other not-yet-reached quantum-computing task. The author left a great sneer in the comments:

Adding a compass is unlikely to also make the bird disoriented when exposed to a weak magnetic field which oscillates at the right frequency. Which means that the emulated bird will not behave like the real bird in this scenario. You could add this phenomenon in by hand. Attach some detector to your compass and have it turn off the compass when these fields are measured. More generally, adding in these features ad hoc will likely work for the things that you know about ahead of time, but is very unlikely to work like the bird outside of its training distribution. If you have a model of the bird that includes the relevant physics for this phenomenon, it is much more likely to work outside of its training distribution.

Ro-ro-rotate your model of the bird, rotate your model of the bird for science!