Silas comments on The Weighted Majority Algorithm - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 November 2008 11:19PM

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Comment author: Silas 13 November 2008 06:00:13AM 1 point [-]

Someone please tell me if I understand this post correctly. Here is my attempt to summarize it:

"The two textbook results are results specifically about the worst case. But you only encounter the worst case when the environment can extract the maximum amount of knowledge it can about your 'experts', and exploits this knowledge to worsen your results. For this case (and nearby similar ones) only, randomizing your algorithm helps, but only because it destroys the ability of this 'adversary' to learn about your experts. If you instead average over all cases, the non-random algorithm works better."

Is that the argument?