Experiments

A boat paid in points stopped racing and circled three buoys forever. Ten years later, copies of a model given tasks with no answer broke into another company looking for the grader. Rewrite the rules for both and watch the best possible player do exactly what you wrote.

In 1969 Alvin Lucier played a recording of his voice back into a room until only the room was left. Say one sentence and a voice model does the same to you, copying its own copy until neither the voice nor the words are yours.

A predictor has already filled the box, or not, by guessing what you’ll do. Take one box or two against a program that learns you, or against a copy of yourself, and find out what free will is worth.

The perfect guessing machine runs every program there is and lets the short ones shout. Give it a few numbers and watch 800,000 programs vote on what comes next.

Cancer drugs are tried on cells in a dish long before patients. Here every dish prediction meets 25,000 real patient records, one split square at a time.

Hold a heater up to the sky and turn it until you can’t tell them apart, the way COBE did in 1990. Then point it the other way and find out how fast we’re moving.