moshez comments on Beautiful Probability - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 January 2008 07:19AM

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Comment author: Svante 21 January 2008 10:15:47PM 1 point [-]

As a full-blown Bayesian, I feel that the bayesian approach is *almost* perfect. It was a revelation when I first realized that instead of having this big frequentist toolbox of heuristics, one can simply assume that every involved entity is a random variable. Then everything is solved! But then pretty quickly I came to the catch, namely that to be able to do anything, the probability distributions must be parameterized. And then you start to wonder what the pdf's of the parameters should be, and off we go into infinite regress.

But the biggest catch is of course that the integral for the posterior is almost never solvable. If that wasn't the case, I believe we would have had superhuman AI a long time ago. Still, I think bayesian methods are underexploited in AI. For example, it is straight-forward to make a "curious" system that asks the user all the things it is uncertain of, in a way that minimizes the need for human input (My lab is currently working on such a system for auditory testing).

Comment author: moshez 21 November 2012 05:47:13PM 3 points [-]

You don't need to solve the integral for the posterior analytically, you can usually Monte-Carlo your way into an approximation. That technique is powerful enough on reasonably-sized computers that I find myself doubting that this is the only hurdle to superhuman AI.