Comment on Manfred 2012

G. Branwen
Department of Commenting, LessWrong at The Internets

In Manfred (2012), the author presents a result on an asymptotically ideal utility-maximization of a function in the presence of incomplete information. We discuss the hidden assumption used in the proof, and exhibit a repaired proof which can be shown to be only a special case of long-established asymptotic universal search algorithms based on Solomonoff induction over all computably enumerable functions, from which the Manfred algorithm does not improve except by a constant factor ε in limited domains.