AlanCrowe comments on Progress on automated mathematical theorem proving? - Less Wrong

14 Post author: JonahSinick 03 July 2013 06:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (65)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 04 July 2013 07:24:49PM 2 points [-]

Do you have evidence in the other direction?

No. I think one typically has to come up with a brutally truncated approximation to actually Bayesian reasoning. For example, if you have n propositions, instead of considering all 2^ n basic conjunctions, ones first idea is to assume that they are all independent. Typically that is a total failure; the independence assumption abolishes the very interactions that were of interest. So one might let proposition n depend on proposition n-1 and reinvent Markov models.

I don't see much hope of being able to anticipate which, if any, crude approximations to Bayesian reason are going to work well enough. One just has to try it and see. I don't think that my comment goes any deeper than saying that there are lots of close to practical things due to be tried soon, so I expect one or two pleasant surprises.

Comment author: JonahSinick 04 July 2013 07:47:18PM 0 points [-]

Ok, thanks for the clarification