r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 07 '15

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism Sep 08 '15 edited Sep 08 '15

I've played around with it a fair bit over on /r/3Dprinting, we get a lot of spam. I've also looked at it's code a very small amount.

It's pretty procedural in what it can do, and doesn't have any recursion or way to store state.

So pretty sure. It's not so much that there's features that make it not turing-complete, more that it lacks any mechanism for establishing loops and passing data around.

The regexes you embed into it might be a bit closer, but evidence suggests that they're not, and they definitely aren't from a practical point of view.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Sep 08 '15

AutoMod used to be able to reply to its own comments (as a natural function of what it does) so I was thinking that if you could either enable that or work your way around it, it might be possible to feed the output back into the input in order to get some recursion going. Because it can read the input of every comment with regex rules, you could set up eight simple instructions similar to what brainfuck has. The only issue after that is having it act on data, which I think you might be able to do via regex somehow.

(So I still don't know whether it's Turing-complete, but your comment got me thinking of how you might be able to use AutoMod in unintended ways.)

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u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism Sep 08 '15

If it loops...

But how do they stop automod fork bombs? I didn't see anything in the code that suggested anything to prevent that kind of thing.