cousin_it comments on AI cooperation is already studied in academia as "program equilibrium" - Less Wrong

35 Post author: cousin_it 30 July 2012 03:22PM

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Comment author: cousin_it 30 July 2012 07:01:35PM *  8 points [-]

Well, cooperating in the Prisoner's Dilemma against an identical agent is a simple special case of UDT reasoning, and people are writing math papers about it as you can see. Besides, if UDT is trivial, how come it has unsolved problems? Off the top of my head: spurious proofs, agent simulates predictor, logical uncertainty... The fact that already solved problems look trivial isn't strong evidence to me, because I know how much effort it takes to get something like Counterfactual Mugging from the "impossible" pile into the "trivial" pile. Actually I'm quite flattered when people on LW now consider UDT solutions trivial, e.g. in the discussion of Psy-Kosh's problem.

Comment deleted 30 July 2012 08:41:54PM *  [-]
Comment author: cousin_it 30 July 2012 10:11:51PM *  3 points [-]

a confused group can have all sorts of variations of halting problem or incompleteness theorem as 'open problems'.

If you're talking about the LW decision theory group rather than some hypothetical group, can you show how any of the open problems above is equivalent to the halting problem or one of the incompleteness theorems?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 30 July 2012 08:21:58PM *  1 point [-]

One simple heuristic formula for approximate problem difficulty I heard is this:

D = log(T)*N

D is difficulty, T is length of time the problem stayed open after being posed, N is the average number of people working on it.

Rationalle:

Since we expect P != NP, finding proofs is an exponential search problem. That means in time T we can only cover problems that have about log(T) shortest proof length. Assuming linear scaling with adding more processing, we have a factor of N (in reality, scaling is sublinear, but this is a heuristic..).

The point is that just because a field has open problems, doesn't mean those problems are necessarily very hard. It could be that either they haven't been open very long, or not enough people care.

Comment author: cousin_it 30 July 2012 09:29:26PM *  2 points [-]

If D is the proof length, surely your reasoning should lead to something like log(T*N) rather than log(T)*N? It seems to me that N people working for T days is T*N person-days, so the two variables should be mostly exchangeable, it's weird to see only one of them under the logarithm...

Comment author: [deleted] 31 July 2012 12:03:03AM 1 point [-]

Since we expect P != NP, finding proofs is an exponential search problem.

P != NP does not imply that one can't do better than an exponential search for finding proofs. For instance an O(n^log(n)) algorithm for finding proofs would not contradict P != NP.