JoshuaZ comments on AI cooperation in practice - Less Wrong

26 Post author: cousin_it 30 July 2010 04:21PM

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

Comments (157)

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

Comment author: JoshuaZ 31 July 2010 01:40:11PM 4 points [-]

An automated proof-checker can identify some correct proofs - but not all of them.

That's a consequence of "Tarski's Undefinability of Truth Theorem":

No. That's not what Tarski's theorem says. Tarski's theorem is a statement about first-order arithmetic descriptions of truth (it can be generalized slightly beyond that but this is the easiest way of thinking about it). It asserts that there's no first-order description of what statements are true in a system that lies in the system.

Proof checking is a very different issue. Proof checking is straightforward. Indeed, most of the time we insist that axiomatic systems have proofs checkable as a primitive recursive function. We can do this in Peano Arithmetic for example, and in PA every proof can be verified by a straightforward algorithm.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 31 July 2010 01:54:08PM *  0 points [-]

[Tarski's theorem] asserts that there's no first-order description of what statements are true in a system that lies in the system.

You'd need be careful about what "system" or "description" are you talking about, since you can weakly represent, say, the set of statements true in Robinson arithmetic (which is recursively enumerable), in Robinson arithmetic. There is a formula s(-) with one free variable such that

Q |- s(gn(f)) iff Q |- f

where gn(f) is the Gödel number of (arbitrary) statement f and Q is Robinson arithmetic.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 31 July 2010 02:01:32PM 1 point [-]

Yes, I know that. I was being deliberately imprecise because it is very easy in this case to get lost in the technical details. My intention was not to convey the theorem's precise statement but rather convey to Tim why it doesn't apply in the context he's trying to use it.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 31 July 2010 02:04:24PM *  1 point [-]

I know you know that, but I couldn't quite naturally interpret your informal statement as saying the formally correct thing, so had to make the clarification.