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 05:05:25PM 4 points [-]

This is correct.

Solomonoff induction accounts for all of the data, which is a binary sequence of sensory-level happenings. In its hypothesis, there would have to be some sub-routine that extracted objects from the sensory data, one that extracted a mass from these objects, et cetera. The actual F=ma part would be a really far abstraction, though it would still be a binary sequence.

Solomonoff induction can't really deal with counterfactuals in the same way that a typical scientific theory can. That is, we can say, "What if Jupiter was twice as close?" and then calculate it. With Solomonoff induction, we'd have to understand the big binary sequence hypothesis and isolate the high-level parts of the program to use just those to calculate the consequence of counterfactuals.