Kateryna Yushchenko - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateryna_Yushchenko_(scientist) <comment><USER2> Another Soviet technology in software development, sounds very interesting but hard to find information about it: It is named R-Technology a visual programming system said to be still used for critical software in the Russian Space Program:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045926X0...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045926X05800163)

"The essence of R-technology is the use of weighted, oriented graphs to express control logic and to enforce good programming style. Unlike other developments in visual programming, R-technology can accommodate many programming languages and has been used for numerous development projects. Despite the fact that it has been extensively documented in the Soviet literature, it is practically unknown in the United States."

<comment><USER3> Re: Soviet visual programming environments, I usually hear DRAKON brought up in that context (as far as what's usually cited in real world use for Buran etc.)

I wonder if "R-technology" is either another term for DRAKON or a distinctly different system. Given how underdocumented Soviet high technology (esp around computing and related fields) is in English sources, either can be considered a real possibility.

<comment><USER4> Its is complitly different. I know DRAKON and it is very different what I see in the article. Also DRAKON is very different from other visual diagraming systems. DRAKON is open but system that is actually used in space programming (if i remember correctly is called Grafit-Floks, [https://books.google.com/books?id=0g9kDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA198&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=0g9kDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA198&lpg=PA198&dq=Grafit- Floks&source=bl&ots=F42sHt0oS2&sig=ACfU3U1Qpw7gnRGP760novl0x2OwcsXMvQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiYtp- rwKzoAhWEiOAKHbBuCdEQ6AEwC3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=Grafit-Floks&f=false)) is not open and as far as I know is not in market. If you are interested in DRAKON there is a forum.drakon.su which has english section and on that forum is made by inventor of DRAKON and he participated in discussion. DRAKON has also wikipedia page.

<comment><USER5> HN discussion from 2016 about DRAKON:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12638032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12638032)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. That page, and the page on the address programming language, both could use a lot more detail and significant editing. Hopefully more people who speak Russian can contribute to these articles.

<comment><USER7> Hear hear. I've explored the old USSR via youtubers like bald and bankrupt and various urban explorer channels (and of course, the amazing HBO/Sky show, chernobyl) but I would love something as digestible based on older computing systems from Russia and beyond. Just yesterday, an urban exploration channel found a bunch of abandoned computers in a bunker that I could not find a single reference to on the internet (and that looked fairly intact).

<comment><USER8> Hey there, those channels you like sound awfully interesting to me as well. Would you mind sharing where you saw this bunker exploration video exactly? Thank you :)

<comment><USER9> For Soviet-era bunkers and similar urbex I suggest you have a look at Shiey ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXwMqnXfJzazKS5fJ8nrVw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXwMqnXfJzazKS5fJ8nrVw/videos)) as well as Urbex Polska's videos on "Sobieskiego 100" ([https://www.youtube.com/user/NaszaRzeczywistosc/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/NaszaRzeczywistosc/videos)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a good book covering the development of computing in Kyiv in those days:

intro: [http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.ht...](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/DIFFERENT/StoreEternally.html) pdf: [http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEter...](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/TXT/MalinovskiyBN_StoreEternally_rus.pdf)

Some more about Kateryna Yushchenko on the Museum's website: [http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/Ushchenko- memoirs.html](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/Ushchenko-memoirs.html)

See also: [http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum- map.html](http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/museum-map.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems that this APL (Address Programming Language) notation is kind of a high-level microcode, similar to one used in Intel x86 CPUs, assuming that not only RAM words, but every register and I/O port are also directly addressable.

Of-course microcode is executable, but Address notation was manually translated into each specific CPU architecture.

Since every operation defined as a set, it seems it supported expressing SIMD- style vectorized computations.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone find any snippet of the above mentioned language?

<comment> ainar-g There are a couple of articles in Russian on Habr[1][2]. At a glance, it seems like the language was closer to a form of mathematical notation than it was to what we now consider a programming language.

[1] [https://habr.com/ru/company/ua- hosting/blog/387837/](https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/387837/)

[2] [https://habr.com/ru/company/ua- hosting/blog/274019/](https://habr.com/ru/company/ua-hosting/blog/274019/)

<comment><USER13> [https://habrastorage.org/r/w780/files/154/629/59f/15462959ff...](https://habrastorage.org/r/w780/files/154/629/59f/15462959ff3d484392601db510c34360.jpg)

Photo of programmers from 1956. Twelve women, zero men.

<comment><USER14> My father worked in one of these Central Calculation Centers in the 80s. Almost all programmers were women. Man tended to work more with the hardware which was considered more "dirty" work since you had to be stuck for hours in those huge machines trying to find the piece that broke. Too bad we lost all our Ada lang, linear programming books...

<comment><USER15> If I'm not mistaken this was the case across the board

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://medium.com/a-computer-of-ones-own/kateryna-l- yushche...](https://medium.com/a-computer-of-ones-own/kateryna-l-yushchenko- inventor-of-pointers-6f2796fa1798)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/flztwo/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/flztwo/til_the_first_highlevel_programming_language/)

-> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl)</comment>


A way to deal with enormous branching factors in strategy games - <AUTHOR> http://togelius.blogspot.com/2016/03/a-way-to-deal-with-enormous-branching.html <comment><USER2> Link to the actual paper: [http://julian.togelius.com/Justesen2016Online.pdf](http://julian.togelius.com/Justesen2016Online.pdf)

I've written an AI for a similar game, where you can't always even iterate over all your moves for this turn, let alone do a multi-ply tree search.

Using their terminology of Action and Turn, my method was to first evaluate individual Actions using a simpler evaluation function, and apply a cutoff so that only a reasonably number of Actions had to evaluated, then combine that reduced group of Actions together to make a reasonable subset of full Turn moves, then use the full evaluation function to find the best Turn.

Writing a good evaluation function for a complex game is hard, so I picked a whole bunch of inputs and then used a genetic algorithm to find weights for them. (Let the various AIs play entire games, and let the winners breed.)

Works okay, but still can't beat a decent human player very often. (There's enough randomness in the game that the better player doesn't always win.)

In this paper, their Online Evolution beat the other four computer strategies, but they don't mention whether it can beat good human players. If it can't, it's not clear to me whether Online Evolution is a good algorithm. Beating their other four algorithms doesn't seem to be a very high bar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Small nitpick regarding Hearthstone: Its branching factor is really not that high. Higher than Chess, but not in the same category as Civilization, which gives you thousands to tens of thousands of potential inputs every turn.

In Hearthstone, you have a specific amount of options you can play (anywhere between 0 and 10-ish), and each option may have one or more targets (usually again between 0-10 ish). This sounds high, but you're able to discard a lot of those options _much_ more easily than you would in Go/Chess (eg. damaging yourself is seldom a good idea).

There's often multiple options you can play per turn, but each option has to be evaluated under the current state of the board since playing a single option can _radically_ alter the game state. So a much fairer approach is to look at a branching factor of about 15, with multiple successive "turns" (eg. each option is a single "turn", and you can play multiple turns before ceding control to the opponent).

<comment><USER4> I think the branching factor is somewhat higher given that the order of actions makes a big difference. Also remember that when playing a card you have to choose where to place it, which can multiply the branching factor by up to 7.

If both of you have 3 minions on the board, each of your minions has a choice of 4 targets, which is already up to 4^3=64 choices. Then considering each order of attacks, and the fact that you can play any card of your hand before or after attacks, and the branching factor has the potential to explode.

<comment><USER3> For nearly all cases (except some you can specify manually and/or discover through deep learning), you can throw away positioning which is why I didn't mention it.

As for the order of actions, I did mention that. The basis of my argument is that you shouldn't consider an entire player's turn as a "turn"; instead, consider each action as a turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how long it will take till we find a way to accelerate the rate of learning. If you give a user (experienced with games), a tablet with the FTL game, chances are they will beat it in 10-30 attempts. AI on the other hand still takes thousands of playthroughs to get good at a game.

<comment><USER6> Well, to be fair even the youngest gamer has spent years and years as baby/toddler focused almost solely on learning how to use his/her brain to reason and make quick strategic decisions. As any parent knows babies know almost nothing and have to learn it all from the scratch and watching them figuring out the world and improving their skills is very insightful to anyone interested in AI. And we often forget how much time and hard work we all invested as kids to perfect our (basic) abilities...

<comment><USER7> A good example is when you throw humans into a game with physics they aren't familiar with. E.g a 4 dimensional game. Or QWOP. Humans then suddenly don't seem so amazing without also taking thousands of attempts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So you've now moved the computational complexity to the fitness function, which needs to consider future moves as well?

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily. If there are factors of a board position that make it strong regardless of future moves, then why can't that information be encoded in the fitness function without having to play future moves forward?

<comment><USER8> Sure, but how would you know? Sacrificing officers in chess is a typical example. Negative expected value short term, but typically long term positive when done intentionally. But generally, if you can come up with a robust fitness function, genetic algorithm is one method, although typically there are better alternatives giving faster results. In my experience, genetic algorithms can be a great start to get something but typically slow. Which matters if you need to simulate a few billion games... Interesting article anyway, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems to me this is the basic difference between a search and situational approach to evaluating game position. Backgammon is another great example, and one that I think has a higher branching factor than even Go does. Minmax only works when you can construct a tree of possible outcomes that is reasonably searchable. Many "contests," like backgammon and Go, cannot be represented as a tree of outcomes so neatly. So you have no choice but to fall back on algorithms that evaluate the current positions without full knowledge of possible outcomes, i.e. heuristics, neural nets, etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In a game like Advance Wars a player turn consists of moving all your units, and very often the order in which you move your units is important, so the branching factor would be even greater than what they estimate.

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a less sophisticated variant* of the AlphaGo approach. In both cases, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is constrained by model for likely future moves. Here, they use a genetic algorithm. In AlphaGo, this is called the "policy network".

* This is not to say that these authors copied AlphaGo -- my uninformed guess is that this general approach of constraining MCTS has been known for a very long time.

<comment><USER12> If I understood correctly, they are not using any MCTS, I believe they are not doing any look ahead, only greedily selecting the best turn.

<comment><USER13> Correct - we are not using MCTS and the approach has nothing to do with AlphaGo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are there theoretical reasons people use genetic algorithms for problems like this? It seems like you lose any local knowledge that something like annealing or stochastic gradient descent type algorithms use, but it's not clear to me that there are many advantages of using it versus some sort of random sampling. I guess in the case where your merit function is decomposable as, for example, the product or sum of a number of lower dimensional functions then it makes sense - but if that's true then I would think there would also be other approaches that would work even better.That is, if genetic algorithms work better than random search then your problem has some structure that would make it amenable to techniques that explicitly take advantage of that structure, thus performing even better.

<comment><USER15> You don't lose local knowledge, no. You're basically doing a bunch of parallel stochastic hill-climbings that can share information. In fact, with suitable parameters, a GA can reduce to a stochastic hill climber.

You're right that the problem structure is key. There's a key theorem called the No Free Lunch Theorem for Search which says that will always be the case. But on search problems with many related local maxima, evolution will often outperform a series of stochastic gradient ascents, because the information in one hill can be applied to another.

Of course, search and knowledge are always two sides of the same coin. The less knowledge you encode, the more search you'll have to do. But GAs allow you to encode knowledge too, in their operators, particularly.

There's been quite a bit of work done on the kinds of fitness landscapes that evolutionary algorithms are better suited for.

[NB: Used 'ascent' terminology to avoid confusion - it's a convention only, of course, energy minimization or fitness maximization]

<comment><USER14> Thank you, very good points! If you have the time to suggest some references I'd greatly appreciate it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Go wasn't "solved" with MCTS. They ignore that there is caching of good moves (a good move 5 turns from now is probably good now too). In StarCraft, the difference between moving 36 degrees to the left doesn't make a big difference, so there are many move combinations which will provide nearly identical output. Additionally, alpha go did use an evaluation metric to measure the board value. Evolution of strategies just sounds like generic algorithms all over again

</comment><comment><USER17> On downtime, I've been playing the new Fire Emblem, which has made me really wonder how the AI works on the simple 3DS hardware. This is a nice complimentary read.

<comment><USER18> At least with the older 3DS Fire Emblem (and to be fair I didn't play it too much), it didn't seem particularly clever. Mostly just choosing which character is more vulnerable, moving into range (probably using a standard A* path algorithm), and attacking with their best option (plus some healing and a few stage specific things).

Pretty standard A.I. from what I could tell. But my memory might not be that great, it was awhile ago that I played it.

Is the new one significantly different from that? What stuck out for you as being particularly clever?

<comment><USER17> Hmm, I guess the way the enemies would line up for attack stances (being adjacent to one another to deal extra damage) caught my attention. That's probably the most notable feature I've seen in the game.

At the same time, you've laid out how the game works quite plainly, and I've read enough about Pac-Man to know that video games can seem more clever than they seem!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You need to to reason abstractly about your moves rather than enumerate through every possible combinations. If you pick a general course of action and then implement the details, the branching factor becomes less of an issue. One way to do that might be to learn a representation of the action space.

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this similar to A* or alpha-beta search but with a fitness function and the random-ness of evolutionary algorithms?

I feel like it might apply well to a strategy game but for something like chess, would not fair as well. Mixing two great move sequences in chess would probably result in disaster

</comment><comment><USER21> Very cool to see this (I worked on Hero Academy). When you say the randomness was removed, does that mean player's hands were a specific fixed shuffle or something else?

How does it fair against good human players? Would it do much worse with randomness added back?

</comment><comment><USER22> Im not a hater, I like reading about different approaches, it's cool. But I dont think anything is being learned here? I wish the system would get better at the game, the more games it plays. From skimming the paper I do not think that is the case here.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting way of approaching the problem.

I didn't realize the go solution "just" used monte carlo branching. Still impressive, but does not seem as revolutionary as it's been portrayed.

<comment><USER24> The insight was to use CNNs to prune the search space. In a sense, the AlphaGo algorithm is to MCTS as importance sampling is to regular Monte Carlo. However, even without the search part, AlphaGo crushes MCTS-based Go algorithms (see [https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how- it...](https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it-works/)). That in and of itself is quite extraordinary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another way to deal with large branching spaces is MCMC.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you cant find a optimal approach in the forrest of possibilities, compile a list of all actions, and start to search from the defeat scenarios?</comment>


How thathigh.com solved the chicken and egg and grew to 1M views/mo with no SEO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mixrank.com/how-thathighcom-solved-the-chicken-and-egg-pr <comment><USER2> I run thathigh.com.

This is an old post, and I'm sure HN will take down the site, since my app engine quota levels are way lower than they used to be. Just to fill you in, I've gone to other projects and haven't had time to keep thathigh up to date.

I had some pretty notable twitter followers, including lindsay lohan, snoop dog, bill maher, doug benson, sarah silverman, and a few others. Still hanging in there at 12k followers, and I absolutely must give a shout out to CrowdBooster (I used them a lot to get so many followers).

At the peak, the site was paying my rent in SF. It doesn't really make any money anymore since I've neglected it.

<comment><USER3> I'd be interested in hearing about how you used CrowdBooster to build a following. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER2> i found their tweet scheduling to be dead accurate, and it was really helpful since most of the most valuable tweets would've happened on the east coast in the morning (or late at night) when I am asleep in CA.

I like crowdbooster because it's simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I've done almost zero SEO."

"I changed the title tags to match each page's content"

That's SEO

"I submitted a site map to Google Webmaster Tools"

That's SEO

"I added the relevant meta tags."

That's SEO.

Sites like this don't tend to grow with SEO, they grow because of a community and social sharing.

<comment><USER4> Yea I think he means link building, which is by far the most time consuming and daunting task of SEO.

<comment><USER5> What do you think linkbaiting on reddit etc is? That's linkbuilding too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have found StumbleUpon to be by far the best way of generating traffic. It won't work for everyone. Don't bother using it for B2B stuff. But if you create quirky fun content aimed at consumers, it can bring a lot of eyeballs to your site. And you don't even have to pay for ads. Bulk-standard link submissions can work very well.

I have a blog that I have not updated for more than a year that still pulls in 100,000+ unique visitors a month via StumbleUpon.

One of the tricks is that once you have a viral article on StumbleUpon, you can use that article to promote other articles, in the hope that they too will be voted up and become viral in turn.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not saying 1M/mo isn't great and something to aspire to for a site without any prior visibility. But.. I read that title quickly and was thinking 1 million uniques.

Since it's more of a niche site than fmylife, I'm wondering if the Google Adsense will get a higher CTR.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the 2nd time an article from thathigh makes it to the frontpage.

I still don't get why it gets upvoted. It is not a high traffic website. I doubt the guy behind makes any money from it.

<comment><USER9> It made enough to cover his rent in SF for one year.

<comment><USER8> that's not a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this the site that stole all of their content from an existing competitor (HighDeas), slapped more advertising on it, then did SEO?

Lame as fuck.

<comment><USER2> This has been a recurring accusation, and it's pretty much 100% BS. Sorry that we can't be enemies, though.

But you should read the article :-)

<comment><USER11> I'm not trying to be combative as I'm genuinely curious:

The interview does imply that you scraped your initial content from other sites though. True or False?

<comment><USER2> Sure, I found some funny stories from different places across the internet to seed the content. Search for "stoner stories" or "funny high ideas" or "weed thoughts" or any remotely similar phrase and you'll find some stuff.

The idea that I targeted a specific site with the intention of ripping them off is absurd, though. That wouldn't even be the right approach to getting something like this off the ground.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vitamin D and Sleep Quality - <AUTHOR> http://lab.hemavu.com/2014/07/31/vitamin-d-and-sleep-quality/#more-145

<comment><USER2> I can verify this with my own n=1 experiment. I take 5000IU daily, and it has improved both my daytime energy and my sleep cycle.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't take any at all and I sleep perfectly well when I want to. Does that count as data?</comment>


The case against plant consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/07/plant-consciousness.html <comment><USER2> While I agree with his reasoning based on his definition of consciousness, I am not sure if this is the most appropriate way of defining consciousness.

We still do not properly understand it, thus we cannot define it. While I try to stray from vague or ambiguous interpretations, I do think it's significant to point that out.

Let's look at the generic definition: * consciousness - "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings." * awareness - "knowledge or perception of a situation or fact."

While a plants' consciousness may not be COMPLEX, it does not mean the absence of conscious. There are things such as cellular intelligence which we know is exhibited in even the smallest of prokaryotes and eukaryotes cells.

At the most abstract interpretation I think consciousness can be defined as a closed system that contain both input and output, in which information is gathered and alters some component of the system itself.

There was a really interesting article the other day on here about how plants were more adaptive to radiation (specifically in Chernobyl) compared to the regions animal counterparts.

To this definition, I think plants exercise consciousness. When we look at life we have to analyze on both the fundamental and complex aspects.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER3> The word "consciousness" has important connotations that are not captured by the generic definition. As others noted, an air conditioner with a built in thermostat can fit the generic definition of consciousness.

When I say an entity is conscious, I mean to say it not only has the ability to react to stimuli, but it can also abstractly choose how to react. It can rewire its own reactions, not just in a Pavlovian sense, but it can also develop internal thought frameworks and route its reactions through the frameworks it prefers.

The only mechanism plants have for improving the way they react to their environment is biological evolution. You could call that mechanism a type of consciousness, but in doing so you would have to treat the _species_ as the conscious entity, not the individual plant; individual plants are like passing thoughts.

Thus I don't think individual plants are conscious unless they have some way to improve their reaction to their environment outside of biological evolution.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Plants engage actively with their environment, and communicate with other plants. Usually by secreting some kind of chemical ("secondary metabolite"), which makes sense given they don't move very fast.

Things that don't move very fast are at an advantage where energy efficiency is important. The general trend is that low-energy things modify their environment chemically and high-energy things modify their environment mechanically. Compare the diversity of human-discovered secondary metabolites from plants/fungi (low power), insects/reptiles/amphibians (medium power), mammals/birds (high power)

[https://www.mpg.de/15791/Plants_and_environment](https://www.mpg.de/15791/Plants_and_environment)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_communication)

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b23/df2807a0fb8e77c4922377...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6b23/df2807a0fb8e77c49223777bda7730f79f4d.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Plant communication is certainly fascinating, but I wouldn't call it a sign of consciousness. Isn't it just another reaction to stimuli?

I can imagine an experiment where some plants are placed in an environment where the communication chemical they secrete interacts with a gas in the air, slowly poisoning the plants. Would the plants adapt by changing their own behavior, or would some later generation survive due to a mutation? If they changed their own behavior, that might point toward a kind of individual consciousness.

<comment><USER4> The medical definition of conciseness includes things like responding to bright light by constructing the iris. It's not high on the scale, but it's very much part of the current definition in active usage. So, in practice it's useful have level of consciousness and as such the minimum can be extremely low without becoming less meaningful.

More importantly as we understand more about the brain we may eventually understand how everything works. Any definition that would then exclude humans as conscious becomes irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> > The medical definition of conciseness includes things like responding to > bright light by constructing the iris.

Which has an interesting parallel with many plant's ability to rotate the face of their leaves towards the current position of the sun.

<comment><USER6> Mimosa Pudica and the Venus Fly Trap respond even faster (in iris response like times).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTcVNyOhUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLTcVNyOhUc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In _The Hidden Life of Trees_ , one cool fact that stuck with me in support of tree consciousness was how trees that are under attack from certain insect species will release pheromones to warn neighboring trees. The neighboring trees will then rapidly increase production of tanins and other defense chemicals to stave of the insect onslaught. pretty cool

<comment><USER8> How do you determine whether the tree releases pheromones to _warn_ others -vs- it _happens_ to release pheromones and it induces a response in the others?

i.e., the former requires intent, whereas the latter simply evolutionary pressure (since the trees with the response would fare better, thus reproduce more successfully).

<comment><USER7> Good question and a difficult one for me to answer as I am no expert here. I believe it was the discovery that trees were using pheromones during an acute external event, with or without "intent" as we understand it, to alter neighboring trees, that was surprising to the researchers as we typically associate pheromones with animals.

If a single tree under duress is using its resources and energy to signal to _other_ trees that have no way of directly helping the tree in question, what evolutionary advantage is being provided to the tree releasing the pheromones?

Not sure I am able to expand on this but it seems that the trees may have an awareness of your last line: _" since the trees with the response would fare better, thus reproduce more successfully"_, and that awareness may be a form of consciousness different than our own.

<comment><USER9> The trees were acacias (there may be other species that do this, I don't know) and the pheromone was ethylene, which is a very simple gas that's used in development of other things in plants, famously like fruit ripening but likely more (can't remember, prob bud development).

<[https://asknature.org/strategy/leaves-signal-presence-of- pre...](https://asknature.org/strategy/leaves-signal-presence-of-predators/>)

> If a single tree under duress is using its resources and energy to signal to > other trees that have no way of directly helping the tree in question, what > evolutionary advantage is being provided to the tree releasing the > pheromones?

Its genetic legacy is being enhanced, if the trees it's protecting are related, which likely they are (very elegant phrasing though! upvoted just for that)

> thus reproduce more successfully", and that awareness may be a form of > consciousness different than our own

Hmm. Be careful here. I need to sit down and read and understand this so please recognise I'm dumping this on you, but

"Michie's design, called MENACE, was a large pile of matchboxes that contained a number of beads and learned to play tic-tac-toe."

...

"MENACE could never win against the perfect algorithm, but ended up drawing every time after about 90 games, making it equally as perfect"

<[https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac- toe...](https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac-toe-machine- learning/>)

I dunno. Where do you draw the line? HTH anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This just sounds like a member of the old guard being uncomfortable with progress. His arguments dont seem very strong, questions over why plants would have such a capacity. Then some hand waving about alternative explanations for experimental results. Probably just another case of the dismantling of human exceptionalism making people uncomfortable.

<comment><USER11> Or perhaps exceptional claims (plants have brains we just can't see them) require exceptional evidence.

<comment><USER12> Like the exceptional claim that human consciousness resides in the brain despite documented evidence of remote viewing [1], terminal lucidity [2], memories of past lives [3], etc.? Maybe it's time these "scientists" start doing actual science instead of sticking to their ultra-materialist dogma.

[1] [https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/air1995.pdf](https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/air1995.pdf)

[2] [https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp- content/uploa...](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp- content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE61_terminal-lucidity-JNMD.pdf)

[3] [https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual- studies/publications/aca...](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual- studies/publications/academic-publications/children-who-remember-previous- lives-academic-publications/)

<comment><USER13> Without leaning one way or the other I've always wondered what neuroimaging one of these experiences would look like. If nothing obvious is happening and the imagee reports a rich and detailed experience it might be persuasive.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. Severe cases of hydrocephalus [1], for example, where an otherwise functional individual is missing large portions of their brain may provide partial answers.

[1] [https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp- content/uploa...](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp- content/uploads/sites/360/2017/12/Discrepancy-between-cerebral-structure-and- cognitive-functioning-JNMD.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sure that "consciousness" is carefully defined in the paper, but, from the article "...whether plants can think, learn, and intentionally choose their actions..." is a much easier position to debate than whether plants are in some sense aware of themselves, their environment and others like themselves, which is what I think of when I hear "consciousness".

<comment><USER15> Honest question: it what sense can anything that exists in an environment be said to _not_ be aware of it? How do you define "awareness" outside of observed reactions to stimuli, which everything in the universe exhibits to varying degrees of complexity?

I submit that what we think of as "consciousness", the awareness of being, is impossible within a model based purely on objectively measurable criteria.

<comment><USER14> You could very well be right! The term "consciousness" is pretty loaded. Even "awareness" is perhaps too vague and indefinable for scientific discourse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For a remarkable footage showing how plants might fit some definition of "conscious", I recommend the French documentary called Microcosmos.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117040/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117040/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmos_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmos_\(film\))

Some of the scenes in time-lapse ("fast motion"), you can see how plants reach out their vines and leaves, moving and feeling the world around them. So, at least they seem to have a level of "awareness", by some definition of the term.

Anecdotally, I've had countless experiences of what might be called "consciousness" in all living beings - but then again, it depends what one means by that word.

Edit: I mean, is a maze-solving slime mold conscious? And what makes human consciousness so uniquely different from slime mold's?

<comment><USER9> Is this the correct film? The links & the wiki page on it talk exclusively about insect interaction.

> how plants reach out their vines and leaves, moving and feeling the world > around them

I could argue cold water dropped into a very hot pan 'spreads out' to 'feel' its environment, 'withdrawing' from the metal where it can.

<comment><USER16> A big portion of the film is about insects - it also contains some wonderful footage (with some high-tech macro photography) of plants and the garden where it all takes place.

Good point about a water droplet's behavior, how it seems to be "alive" in some aspects - all due to physical/chemical reations. I think it's related to the question of what "alive" means, and how it's different from inert, non- living material.

With slime mold, much of its behavior is just like water - spreading, dripping, with surface tension, etc. - but there's definitely a difference (perhaps only subjectively), that an observer would say it "feels its way" toward a food source. I suppose the fact that we ascribe "feeling" to it, means we consider it alive, aware, and perhaps conscious.

<comment><USER9> > With slime mold...

Seems it goes further. "People are irrational. Example: You wouldn't buy a new dress, or suit, that costs $100 ('that's far too much to spend!') but you would buy one that was $300, but is now 'reduced' to $150 ('but just look at how far down it's come!') Sound familiar? You're not alone, it's fairly well- known that humans are irrational (at least by those in advertising- some products in supermarkets are never meant to be bought- they're just there to get you to buy other products more), but are other animals just as irrational?"

Turns out slime moulds fall for it too. Full article [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad- science/think-y...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad- science/think-you-re-sometimes-irrational-you-re-not-the-only-one-8211-slime- moulds-are-irrational-too) That really complicates thins.

All that said, I am really uncomfortable talking about consciousness in these contexts at all, for obvious reasons. When we can identify and quantify, I'll talk. See my point elsewhere about matchboxes learning.

Edit: fixed link

<comment><USER16> Ah, I love slime moulds (I thought "mold" was American spelling, but apparently even Scientific American spells it "mould") - thank you for the article. It's funny to think of moulds making irrational decisions.

> slime moulds make decisions through comparison to the other available > options, rather than having an intrinsic value for things

That sense of subjectivity and "thought" process to make decisions, sure sounds like consciousness to me - but then again, a stream flowing down a mountain also "makes decisions", and I'm not sure if there's a quantifiable difference.

I just read the article you linked elsewhere: How 300 Matchboxes Learned to Play Tic-Tac-Toe [0]. When we call a completely mechanical process "learning", it seems to imply some kind of subjectivity and "thinking".

It's hard for me to pinpoint, what is the difference between a human and a machine learning? The difference seems merely the level of complexity.

Discussion about consciousness usually breaks down, I think, because the root of this concept is in our belief systems and philosophical view of life. At one end of the spectrum, all of existence is "conscious" in varying degrees; at the other end, nothing is really "conscious", it can all be explained as mechanical processes. The latter used to be a "heretical" worldview, to deny the "spirit" pervading all creation. These days, I'd say the former view is the odd one out, being unscientific (without experimental evidence) and based on an iffy definition of consciousness.

[https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac- toe...](https://opendatascience.com/menace-donald-michie-tic-tac-toe-machine- learning/)

\---

Edit: Here's a quote I just came across:

> Freeman Dyson argued that "mind, as manifested by the capacity to make > choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron."

..And a comment elsewhere mentioned, "consciousness as an emergent property of physical systems". That seems to be getting closer to a reasonable definition/explanation.

<comment><USER9> Agreed about the spelling, I thought it was UK/US mold/mould.

If you like slime moulds then, just in case you haven't met Dictyostelium discoideum, check out that on youtube. It goes from a collection of single- cells to a 'slug', a small multi-cellular organism which goes for a wander. Quite mind-blowing when I first met this behaviour.

All I can say is consciousness is a bugger. Everyone seems to have some idea of what it is except me, and I'm not going to claim that I am. I just don't know.

Anyway, a pleasant and constructive discussion, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A thing being alive (collection of cells being "not dead") and sentient are two different things. If we assume sentience is some kind of concentration of information, then I would assume regular plants' synapses are not complex enough to create a relevant feedback loop of consciousness. Mushrooms and their networks (interconnected myceliums) on the other hand may be a different case.

<comment><USER2> This is actually a really interesting comparison. From what I have studied, mushrooms behave similar to a neural network. This is one of the reasons they are so good at revitalizing forests and are seemingly unaffected by viruses. Not to mention their benefits on immune regulation in primates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This relies on the assumption that the authors model of consciousness is "correct" for lack of a better term. If you accept this model, then we should be able to agree on this conclusion, but it's not like this is the only model of consciousness out there. This is just one model of one type of consciousness that we think we can agree on. The truth is, we don't know that plants aren't conscious, just that if they are, they don't use the same mechanisms to experience it. It's like saying that life is impossible on a planet without carbon. It's possible that silicon based life exists it there somewhere, we've just never directly observed it.

</comment><comment><USER19> For a layman's introduction to the case for plant consciousness, Monica Gagliano and her plant consciousness experiments were featured on Radiolab last year (transcript available): [https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/plant- parade](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/plant-parade)

<comment><USER20> I saw her present at a conference recently, and subsequently bought her book. I'm finding it all fascinating, especially the pea plant experiment. I am not well enough informed about the state of the art in either consciousness research/thinking or plant reactions/behaviours, but it's certainly made me acutely aware there's something going on there which doesn't fit in with my mental model of how plants work.

I'm going to be following along here for quite some time I suspect...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fungal networks act as a communication web. All plants are part fungi. The layer of mycelium in the dirt is both a digestive tract and a lung. We carry our stomachs, intestines, and lungs in sacks called bodies as we walk around, fungi are laid down instead. Fascinatingly, mycelium break down rocks and create soil from stone. Fungal networks will also allow inter-plant communication for insect-warding chemicals to be released, and also fungi will decomposition logs which provide bees with vital Cytochrome P450 action that cleanses their system of virii.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure why having neurons enters into the equation _at all_ when deciding whether something is conscious.

This is a hard question and the Feinberg-Mallatt definition of consciousness seems circular.

An artificial or alien life form might possess consciousness without having traversed the same evolutionary trajectory as animals, and will probably not possess animal neurons. Even a sufficently diverged animal might use novel strategies for organizing neurons (or alternatives to neurons?) to sense, move, focus attention, and remember.

<comment><USER23> > I'm not sure why having neurons enters into the equation at all when > deciding whether something is conscious.

Because neuroscience is bigger business than philosophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Those interested in this topic may wish to check out Michael Marder's "Plant- Thinking" [2013] -- on the philsophical rather than scientific end of the spectrum, but thought-provoking.

</comment><comment><USER25> In my humble opinion, in a nutshell:

There is no such thing as consciousness, i.e. a mechanism that defines consiousness.

There is only a simulation process inside organisms that tries to mimic reality in order to predict the outcome of the current situation and subsequently produce a 'get away'-oriented or 'stay'-oriented response.

This simulation process' complexity is relative to the complexity of the organism.

The more complex the simulation is, the clearer the definition of objects in it is.

The clearer the definition of objects is, the clearer the definition of self is.

The clearer the definition of self is the higher the degree of 'consciousness' is.

I.e. consciousness can be defined as the ability of something to perceive itself.

With that definition, it is clear that that ability of self-perception changes from organism to organism.

Thus plants have a low ability to perceive themselves, and humans have the highest.

If we are searching for the mechanism of consciousness, we will never find it, because it doesn't exist: consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the operations of an organism.

</comment><comment><USER26> >"Feinberg and Mallatt concluded that only vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopods possess the threshold brain structure for consciousness.

The relationship betwen brain structure and consciousness is so poorly understood that this statement is basically idiotic. We know various ways to affect consciousness in humans. For example, using blunt force or drugs. However, we have no understanding at all of any mechanisms by which matter gives rise to consciousness and we cannot even be sure that matter does give rise to consciousness. And we have no way to evaluate the relationship between matter and consciousness in non-human entities like plants that do not communicate to us in any understandable (to us) way about their consciousness or lack of it.

It often amazes me how many people are highly advanced in their own technical fields but fail to grasp the hard problem of consciousness - something that can be understood by a bright kid.

</comment><comment><USER27> There seems to be a predisposition toward consciousness as a property of nervous systems, or biological systems.

in speculation perhaps the concept of consciousness as an emergent property of physical systems should be explored. if consciousness is dependent on persistence of a quantum mechanism it is possible for consciousness to exist as a result of any sufficiently spanning rule parsing interactions; And i'll just leave this right here;

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183954.Hidden_Order](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183954.Hidden_Order)

</comment><comment><USER28> So here's an interesting question: if plants are conscious, can vegans eat them? And if not, what will they eat? Not trying to troll vegans; if this is different and some one can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

<comment><USER29> I'm not a vegan, but if you think of veganism as more of a "harm reduction" approach to eating, it doesn't matter whether you define plants to be conscious or not. As in, it causes relatively more harm to a large number of organisms to eat an animal as food (the animals are presumably going to eat plants anyway), versus cutting out the middle man and just eating plants.

<comment><USER24> Vegan here -- naturally, there are as many philosophical approaches to vegan practice as there are vegans, but for me and others I know, it definitely is oriented toward 'harm-reduction' [or as I like to say, minimizing exploitation].

It's impossible to live and thrive without being detrimental to other organisms - for me, the idea is to accept the inevitable cycle of struggle and violence, while minimizing the _exploitative treatment_ of other beings [plant or animal -- easier said than done with regard to plants -- one easy step is to include as much fruit and perennial leaf matter in the diet as practical [i.e., the plant is treated more like something to be nurtured rather than merely 'grown and discarded']

<comment><USER30> I went vegan initially after comparing the harmful effects of animal products with the relative ease of eating something else. Subjectively, I feel much healthier eating plant based, Whole foods. I have noticed beneficial effects as well-lost weight, for instance. Though I do perceive eating plants as more moral than animal products, as well. It seems like plants don't experience treatment like animals do, just as a general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This discussion appears to have completely ignored the concept of a "sensorium" for a definition of consciousness which seems to me to be the only defining requirement. Whether or not it is possible to externally detect this is an open question.

It is hard to imagine that anything with eyes doesn't have this, and yet functioning eyes are clearly not a requirement. The only requirement at all one would assume is integrated information processing - but even that is not necessarily a given.

</comment><comment><USER31> To build that case you need most people to agree on what consciousness means first. So far no one still understand fully what it means

</comment><comment><USER32> I would have to think something like... Plants cannot plan, reason or postulate or conceptualize etc, they can only respond similar to a chemical reaction but with the added complexity of evolution giving them much more nuanced reactions appropriate to specific scenarios... rather than trying to say the word consciousness as that is a loaded concept.

</comment><comment><USER23> I chuckled at the notion that attributing consciousness to plants is 'anthropomorphizing'.

</comment><comment><USER33> This article makes two assumptions that need more support. One, that having a particular "threshold brain structure" is a necessary condition for consciousness. And two, that consciousness is a binary, as opposed to a spectrum.

</comment><comment><USER34> We don't really understand what consciousness is, so no one can say that plants have no consciousness. For me , everything has consciousness, but in varied degrees, or frequencies in a spectrum of existence.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's so clear watching them, especially if you use time lapse photography, that they are conscious.

</comment><comment><USER36> They're made out of MEAT [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ)

</comment><comment><USER37> For now. Wait till some superintelligence gives them skrodes.

</comment><comment><USER38> Plants don't have consciousness because. They. Don't. Have. Brains.

</comment><comment><USER39> If plants have no consciousness does that make them any less worthy of care? Consciousness is nice, I'm glad I have some, but it's just one among many strategies that may help us replicate. Like flight or teeth or roses. An unconscious organism is different than a conscious one but not necessarily lesser in the way that matters: genetic survival.

It may be that consciousness is a net positive to us in that it lets us adapt to conditions more quickly. Our genes may last longer than plant genes as a result. But it also burdens us with destructive tendencies that threaten our survival. The jury is out.

<comment><USER40> > "If plants have no consciousness, does that make them any less worthy of > care?"

No it doesn't, but that's not what's at debate. The fact anyone needed to be told plants aren't conscious is kind of crazy.

There's an insinuation that level-of-consciousness is the measure by which we should judge the importance of organisms. This is an anthropocentric view of life, and a shallow one at that.</comment></comment>