endoself comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 October 2012 10:12PM

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Comment author: endoself 21 October 2012 02:12:01PM 2 points [-]

The problem with this is that something can both be caused and appear in a lot of causal interactions. For example, if I launch a giant mirror into space to block out the sun, all of the arrows from the sun to brightness everywhere have to be changed. In AI, this is often represented using plate notation, where a rectangle (the plate) is drawn around a group of variables that repeat and an arrow from outside the plate effects every instance of the variables in the plate.