I hope someone can provide a deeper indication to what is going on - on first reading it looks like the iron bar is simply recording past events. The observer would be the one who decides to use this information to extrapolate into future events - the iron bar just sitting there.
It's a weird analogy, but it makes sense in the context of the paper's authors' statement:<p>> "The most important implication that we wish to claim is that the proposed scheme will provide a new perspective for understanding the information-processing principles of certain lower forms of life," Kim, from the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics' National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, told Phys.org. "These lower lifeforms exploit their underlying physics without needing any sophisticated neural systems."
The decision is still made by the human evaluator(s). (Presumably, to declare one slot machine the "easiest".)<p>Terrible headline.<p>Are they even suggesting that the bar is somehow affected by the output of (perhaps) coins from the slot machine... electromagnetic interactions? Or is the slot machine example simply a thought experiment? I suspect we may be attempting to process bad input here...
After reading the original publication, the analogy to an iron bar is just confusing the point.<p>The article states: "Every time the outcome of a play of machine A ends in a reward, the bar moves to the left a specific distance, and every time the outcome ends in no reward, the bar moves to the right a specific distance. The same goes for a play of machine B, but the directions of the bar movements are reversed. After enough trials, the bar's total displacement reveals which slot machine offers the better winning probability." There's no locomotion reinforcement which can apply to the iron bar.<p>Something (either a physical mechanism or a guiding hand) needs to move the bar. Now the math of problem solving seems to still work out, but the mechanism of locomotion needs to be included in the system to get a proper description of the entropy at play.
Next up, digital arrows next to headlines is capable of decision-making (removing physicality).<p>I'm sorry but this sounds more like a way of measurements and calculations than actual decision-making, as that's been decided by the maker or user of the object.
Analog computing by ascribing meaning to motion, and cognizant of directions (in this case); while the bar may be 'just sitting there', an embedded device within, imbued with a human way ('intelligence') of 'reasoning' about lateral movements would be able to support decision making.
Take another analogous case of a twig moving in a brook: the twig doesn't 'need to know' the parameters of water flow in a brook as humans do, to determine which way to turn and tumble as it meanders through the water; it need not care about 'calculations' of water pressure, the topology of the ground beneath, obstructions in its path, spin induced by local eddy currents and what not to merrily cruise along; from a human perspective, an immense amount of computation (should) be involved.
Yet, as the water rolls along, equations of continuity needn't be solved, no moments need be calculated, as pure physical properties and forces do the trick.
Lot to learn from analog computing: digital computing is after all, a subset of it at the electronic level, could one say? :-)
This is really about inference, and less about "decision-making."<p>First, the bar is has a action-response rule-based mechanism based on the input of winning or losing combined with which direction it came from right or left. That's it.<p>An externality can then <i>infer</i> that the bar has made a decision, but of course, the bar has made no such decision.<p>This is still useful, but it's overblown to call this "decision-making" outside of decisions made exclusively within a strict framework of primitive rules. That said, many fundamental human reactions and decisions follow a pretty strict framework of primitive rules. That's why most people fail to grok the ladder of inference: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJLqOclPqis" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJLqOclPqis</a>
Add a couple more iron bars and you may recreate the 1938 Zuse Z1 [1]. Not sure what's the news here.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)</a>
Link to journal article referenced: <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/8/083023/" rel="nofollow">http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/8/083023/</a>
Reading the article, it appears to me the researchers are talking about harnessing physical fluctuations in a process to achieve an outcome similar to some sort of computational modeling of the same process.<p>I don't think they're literally saying the iron bar is making a decision, and I'm a little surprised that would have flown over the heads of most of the readers here.