Kawoomba comments on Risks of downloading alien AI via SETI search - Less Wrong

9 Post author: turchin 15 March 2013 10:25AM

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Comment author: Kawoomba 15 March 2013 09:47:24PM 0 points [-]

I dunno, that sounds a bit too fishy.

If there weren't such a constant, I think it would follow that in effect K.C. wouldn't be generally incomputable. (I may dwell on it further, once I'm sober in the morrow.)

(...) looking for one that has greater than a certain complexity.

The problem with your approach is that K. C. isn't computable, so you wouldn't know if you've found the exact K.C. of that bit string. Even iterating through all programs that generate it wouldn't give you the answer to that one, since you're not iterating from lowest K.C. to highest, but only from the uncompressed smallest program upwards.

Comment author: Manfred 15 March 2013 09:53:49PM *  1 point [-]

The problem with your approach is that K. C. isn't computable, so you wouldn't know if you've found the exact K.C. of that bit string. Even iterating through all programs that generate it wouldn't give you the answer to that one, since you're not iterating from lowest K.C. to highest, but only from the uncompressed smallest program upwards.

Ah, right, halting problem. Can't do step 1. Okay.