RichardKennaway comments on A Proof of Occam's Razor - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Unknowns 10 August 2010 02:20PM

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

Comments (121)

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

Comment author: RichardKennaway 11 August 2010 09:06:12AM 5 points [-]

Indeed you could, but that problem is already present in the definition of Kolmogorov complexity. It's only defined up to an arbitrary additive constant determined by (in one formulation) the choice of a universal Turing machine. The Kolmogorov complexity of a string is the size of the shortest input for that UTM that produces that string as output, but there's nothing in the definition to prevent the UTM from having any finite set of arbitrary strings on speed-dial.

Comment author: cousin_it 11 August 2010 09:36:43AM *  0 points [-]

Kelly deals with this by looking at complexity from other angles. For example, a complex world can give you a long sequence of observations persuading you that it's a simple world and then suddenly "change its mind", but a simple world cannot pretend that it's complex.

Comment author: DanielLC 16 December 2010 04:51:55AM 0 points [-]

Why not? It would look almost exactly like the complex worlds imitating it, wouldn't it?