Alex_Altair comments on An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction - Less Wrong

53 Post author: Alex_Altair 11 July 2012 08:05AM

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Comment author: Alex_Altair 09 July 2012 04:26:51PM 3 points [-]

You are pretty much correct.

The causal reason that Bayes' theorem is in the article is because Luke wrote that part before I was involved. If I had written it from scratch, I probably wouldn't have included it.

But I think it's reasonable to include it because this is an article for laymen, and Bayes' theorem is a really important piece to have your knowledge of rationality built around. Furthermore, the discovery of Solomonoff induction was motivated by the search for objective priors, which is a Bayes' theorem thing.

But you're exactly correct that hypotheses either match or they don't. The updating of probabilities occurs when you renormalize after eliminating hypotheses. Also, I've thought about it for a while and concluded that no modification is needed to represent probabilistic hypotheses. I may write a piece later about how Bayes' theorem is consistent with Solomonoff induction.