ICFP/SPLASH 2025 (series) / SPLASH 2025 (series) / Onward! Essays /
Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain
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.
Sat 18 OctDisplayed time zone: Perth change
Sat 18 Oct
Displayed time zone: Perth change
10:30 - 12:15 | Onward! Papers and EssayOnward! Papers / Onward! Essays at Peony SE Chair(s): Stephen Kell King's College London | ||
10:30 30mTalk | X-by-Construction: Towards Ensuring Non-Functional Properties in by-Construction Engineering Onward! Papers Maximilian Kodetzki Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Tabea Bordis Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Alex Potanin Australian National University, Ina Schaefer KIT | ||
11:00 40mTalk | Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain Onward! Essays Kartik Chandra MIT, Amanda Liu Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joshua B. Tenenbaum Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
11:40 10mTalk | Closing Onward! Papers | ||