ciphergoth comments on Problematic Problems for TDT - Less Wrong

36 Post author: drnickbone 29 May 2012 03:41PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 23 May 2012 09:38:41AM 9 points [-]

"Before you entered the room, I ran a simulation of this problem as presented to an agent running TDT. ...."

This needs some serious mathematics underneath it. Omega is supposed to run a simulation of how an agent of a certain sort handled a certain problem, the result of that simulation being a part of the problem itself. I don't think it's possible to tell, just from these English words, that there is a solution to this fixed-point formulation. And TDT itself hasn't been formalised, although I assume there are people (Eliezer? Marcello? Wei Dai?) working on that.

Cf. the construction of Gödel sentences: you can't just assume that a proof-system can talk about itself, you have to explicitly construct a way for it to talk about itself and show precisely what "talking about itself" means, before you can do all the cool stuff about undecidable sentences, Löb's theorem, and so on.

Comment author: ciphergoth 23 May 2012 12:06:58PM 8 points [-]

But TDT already has this problem - TDT is all about finding a fixed point decision.