khafra comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: polymathwannabe 29 September 2014 01:28PM

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Comment author: Skeptityke 04 October 2014 06:38:26PM 1 point [-]

Question for AI people in the crowd: To implement Bayes' Theorem, the prior of something must be known, and the conditional likelihood must be known. I can see how to estimate the prior of something, but for real-life cases, how could accurate estimates of P(A|X) be obtained?

Also, we talk about world-models a lot here, but what exactly IS a world-model?

Comment author: khafra 10 October 2014 02:43:59PM 0 points [-]

To implement Bayes' Theorem, the prior of something must be known

Not quite the way I'd put it. If you know the exact prior for the unique event you're predicting, you already know the posterior. All you need is a non-pathologically-terrible prior, although better ones will get you to a good prediction with fewer observations.