shminux comments on The Problem with AIXI - Less Wrong

24 Post author: RobbBB 18 March 2014 01:55AM

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Comment author: shminux 12 March 2014 05:52:09PM *  1 point [-]

Are there toy models of, say, a very simple universe and an AIXItl-type reasoner in it? How complex does the universe have to be to support AIXI? Game-of-life-complex? Chess-complex? D&D complex? How would one tell?

Comment author: TimFreeman 20 March 2014 03:26:04PM *  1 point [-]

If you give up on the AIXI agent exploring the entire set of possible hypotheses and instead have it explore a small fixed list, the toy models can be very small. Here is a unit test for something more involved than AIXI that's feasible because of the small hypothesis list.

Comment author: solipsist 13 March 2014 04:59:03PM 2 points [-]

Game-of-life and (I assume) D&D are turing complete, so I would assume at first blush that they are as complicated as our laws of physics. They may simulate turing machines with an exponential slow-down though -- is that what you're getting it?

Comment author: shminux 13 March 2014 05:10:02PM 1 point [-]

What I mean is that in the GoL or another Turing-complete cellular automaton one can specify a universe by a few simple rules and initial conditions. I wonder if it is possible to construct a simple universe with a rudimentary AIXItl machine in it. As a first step, I would like to know how to define an AIXItl subset of a cellular automaton.

Comment author: V_V 13 March 2014 10:54:41PM 3 points [-]

Writing any non-trivial program in such simple cellular automata is often too difficult to be pratically feasible. Think of designing a race car by specifying the position of each individual atom.

Comment author: Nornagest 13 March 2014 11:00:10PM *  2 points [-]

If you've got a modular way of implementing logical operations in a cellular automaton, which we do in Life, you could automate the tedious parts by using a VHDL-like system. The resulting grid would be impractically huge, but there's probably no good way around that.

Comment author: V_V 14 March 2014 12:45:22PM 0 points [-]

Sure

Comment author: Houshalter 18 March 2014 09:34:23AM 0 points [-]

Any universe that contains AIXI would be too complex to be modeled by AIXI. AIXI requires finding programs that reproduce it's inputs exactly. But you could get past this constraint by looking for programs that predict the data, rather than recreating it exactly.

You could make it's environment an actual computer. Something like Core Wars. That makes creating and simulating it a lot simpler.

This would be an interesting experiment to do, although I predict AIXI would just kill itself fairly quickly.

Comment author: V_V 13 March 2014 02:17:16PM 0 points [-]

Game of Life is Turing-complete.