3p1cd3m0n comments on Open Problems Related to Solomonoff Induction - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Wei_Dai 06 June 2012 12:26AM

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

Comments (102)

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

Comment author: Kindly 15 January 2015 02:21:36AM 0 points [-]

It doesn't: for example, the set of strings 0, 10, 110, 1110, 11110, 111110, ... is infinite and prefix-free. So is the set of C-style (null-terminated) strings.

Comment author: 3p1cd3m0n 16 January 2015 03:50:52AM 0 points [-]

I see. Does the method of normalization you gave work even when there is an infinite number of hypotheses?

Comment author: Kindly 16 January 2015 03:58:50AM 0 points [-]

It does. The infinite sum will always converge, so by normalizing we can make it converge to 1.

Take gjm's approach to explaining the normalization, in which the initial weight of 2^-length assigned to a hypothesis is the probability that you obtain that hypothesis by choosing bits at random. Then the normalization is just a conditional probability: you divide by the probability that, when choosing bits at random, you do eventually end up hitting a hypothesis.