h a l f b a k e r yThe phrase 'crumpled heap' comes to mind.
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This is not GM magic, honestly.
Coming out of the discussion on the human maths coprocessor, it occurs to me there is a possible way of doing this. Take a juvenile electric fish and a number of neurons from its body. Connect them together to form, well, let's not be too ambitious here, a serial
binary adder, then graft that into its electric organ. Graft luminous organs onto it too, joined appropriately to the adder. You then have a very basic information processing device which can do integer addition and display the results. Put the fish in a helmet-shaped aquarium and put it on - obviously it should be fed regularly. Then, the fish will be able to detect your brain signals, you will be able to train yourself to turn them on and off to signal to the fish's adder, and somehow (sorry) the fish will be able to signal the results back at you in binary, which you can then see through a periscope.
I know it's sketchy, but here we all are. I will fill in details if you don't call magic.
Symbiosis in Fiction
http://tvtropes.org...hp/Main/TheSymbiote
Various types of things living with other things in fiction... for better or for worse etc. [Jinbish, Dec 17 2010]
Does a SQID count as a fish?
http://www.lanl.gov...03/squid_text.shtml
[mouseposture, Dec 18 2010]
[link]
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you lost me at the snake... |
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OK, the bits that need filling in are:
1) Creating an electronic/electomagnetic brain-signal connection thingy to allow human-to-fish signalling
2) Getting the fish to care what those signals may be, and not to confuse the subtle difference between the thoughts "Add 21 and 34" and "I would like a cup of tea"
3) Have the fish trained to cooperate based on the brain-signals it receives, and in turn encode those signals into a thought-pattern that (presumably) triggers the snake to count up to some specified number, then report back its answer to be unencoded by the fish into a pattern of luminousness that the human can recognise as a discrete value.
4) Make all of this more convenient to use than a pocket calculator.
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I do quite like the idea of having some kind of creature attached to the side of my face, feeding on my mind-rays, but beyond that it does seem rather far-fetched. |
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//I do quite like the idea of having some kind of creature attached to the side of my face// its called "love" [zen-tom] |
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btw any chance of seeing you this side of xmas? |
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Hope so - it may be a close call though, for some reason everything (and everyone) seems extra busy on the run-up to Christmas this year. Maybe it's the way the holidays fall this year, or maybe everyone's trying to appear extra keen at a time when people are worried about staying in work, maybe it's the days lost to snow and ice - but personally, I can't believe that there's only one more week left - where did the year go? |
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Are't we in Babel Fish territory with this one? |
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Among others, [DrBob}. {points to link} |
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But I think they stopped when they'd adder nuff of it. |
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Come to think of it, yes, it is rather Babel fishy. |
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[Ling], i note that you are named after a fish. |
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By adder i meant a circuit which performs binary addition on its
inputs, but serially. So, if you want to add twenty-one and thirty-four,
you think: thought for start of instruction; tennis-not tennis-tennis-
not tennis-tennis; thought for comma; tennis-not tennis-not tennis-
not tennis-tennis-not tennis; thought for add and execute. Then the
fish's luminous organ flashes the answer back at you: dah-dah-dit-
dah-dah-dah. You see this through your periscope and convert it
back to decimal mentally. |
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You could simplify this by fixing the word length at, say, sixty-four
bits, or by just adding one bit. The fish would also have to signal
overflow and carry bits. I'm obviously thinking twos complement for
subtraction. |
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So, [zen_tom], to address your points: |
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One: This is already in place. Fish with electric organs can detect
nerve impulses remotely so that they can detect prey in murky
water. |
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Two: Reflex arcs. There would presumably also be many attempts
to add thoughts about various racket-based sports to each other, but
these could safely be ignored. This has the advantage of avoiding
habituation and the need to induce amnesia in the fish during the
Wimbledon season. |
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Three: Aha, no! The fish has a separate set of reflexes and possibly
an entirely separate nervous system to deal with this. It needn't
learn to cooperate. A somewhat more sophisticated version might
involve a ray and a cuttlefish stapled together, allowing the ray to
use the cuttlefish as a raster display. |
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Four: It just isn't, but it's a prototype. |
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Back to the Babel Fish: I could probably offer you a torpedo ray
which does ROT13. It's better than nothing. |
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Very cool link [mouseposture].
hmmm |
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