Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem’s Brain
Name
3759429.3762631.pdf
Size
1.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ef73875d9e471c027d28cf6f1e12a43b
Author(s)
Chandra, Kartik
Liu, Amanda
Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Date Issued
October 9, 2025
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software
Citation
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem’s Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 204–212.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
Description
Onward! ’25, Singapore, Singapore
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3759429.3762631
