Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 01 January 2010 05:02PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (725)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (725)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 29 January 2010 07:23:29PM 0 points [-]

For now, I'm focusing on getting a better idea of what kind of mathematical structure preference should be

What is/are your approach(es) for attacking this problem, if you don't mind sharing?

Since I don't have self-contained results, I can't describe what I'm searching for concisely, and the working hypotheses and hunches are too messy to summarize in a blog comment. I'll give some of the motivations I found towards the end of the current blog sequence, and possibly will elaborate in the next one if the ideas sufficiently mature.

In my UDT1 post I suggested that the mathematical structure of preference could be an ordering on all possible (vectors of) execution histories of all possible computations. This seems general enough to represent any conceivable kind of preference (except preferences about uncomputable universes), but also appears rather useless for answering the question of how preferences should be merged.

Yes, this is not very helpful. Consider the question: what is the difference between (1) preference, (2) strategy that the agent will follow, and the (3) whole of agent's algorithm? Histories of the universe could play a role in semantics of (1), but they are problematic in principle, because we don't know, nor will ever know with certainty, the true laws of the universe. And what we really want is to get to (3), not (1), but with good understanding of (1) so that we know (3) to be based on our (1).

Comment author: Wei_Dai 30 January 2010 01:25:07AM 0 points [-]

I'll give some of the motivations I found towards the end of the current blog sequence, and possibly will elaborate in the next one if the ideas sufficiently mature.

Thanks. I look forward to that.

Histories of the universe could play a role in semantics of (1), but they are problematic in principle, because we don't know, nor will ever know with certainty, the true laws of the universe.

I don't understand what you mean here, and I think maybe you misunderstood something I said earlier. Here's what I wrote in the UDT1 post:

More generally, we can always represent your preferences as a utility function on vectors of the form <E1, E2, E3, …> where E1 is an execution history of P1, E2 is an execution history of P2, and so on.

(Note that of course this utility function has to be represented in a compressed/connotational form, otherwise it would be infinite in size.) If we consider the multiverse to be the execution of all possible programs, there is no uncertainty about the laws of the multiverse. There is uncertainty about "which universes, i.e., programs, we're in", but that's a problem we already have a handle on, I think.

So, I don't know what you're referring to by "true laws of the universe", and I can't find an interpretation of it where your quoted statement makes sense to me.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 30 January 2010 01:16:58PM 0 points [-]

If we consider the multiverse to be the execution of all possible programs, there is no uncertainty about the laws of the multiverse.

I don't believe that directly posing this "hypothesis" is a meaningful way to go, although computational paradigm can find its way into description of the environment for the AI that in its initial implementation works from within a digital computer.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit