Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong

256 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 11 May 2012 04:31AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 May 2012 08:01:18PM 7 points [-]

purchase enough computing power so that even the dumbest AIXI approximation schemes are extremely effective

There isn't that much computing power in the physical universe. I'm not sure even smarter AIXI approximations are effective on a moon-sized nanocomputer. I wouldn't fall over in shock if a sufficiently smart one did something effective, but mostly I'd expect nothing to happen. There's an awful lot that happens in the transition from infinite to finite computing power, and AIXI doesn't solve any of it.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 15 May 2012 08:06:09PM 3 points [-]

There isn't that much computing power in the physical universe. I'm not sure even smarter AIXI approximations are effective on a moon-sized nanocomputer.

Is there some computation or estimate where these results are coming from? They don't seem unreasonable, but I'm not aware of any estimates about how efficient largescale AIXI approximations are in practice. (Although attempted implementations suggest that empirically things are quite inefficient.)

Comment author: jsteinhardt 18 May 2012 02:05:21PM 4 points [-]

Naieve AIXI is doing brute force search through an exponentially large space. Unless the right Turing machine is 100 bits or less (which seems unlikely), Eliezer's claim seems pretty safe to me.

Most of mainstream machine learning is trying to solve search problems through spaces far tamer than the search space for AIXI, and achieving limited success. So it also seems safe to say that even pretty smart implementations of AIXI probably won't make much progress.