Suppose we are playing any game in which we repeatedly choose an option from some potentially infinite class and then receive a bounded payoff (dependent only on my choice in this round). Then I can do as well as the best computable strategy in expectation (to within a constant) by using multiplicative weights over the space of computable strategies (I've mentioned this before, but didn't realize the difference between these set-ups at the time). Note that this strategy may be randomized, if you only allow me to bet all-or-nothing (or more generally if the space of strategies isn't convex in the suitable sense).
This lets you win probabilistically at game 3, but its not immediately clear whether it lets you win at games 1 and 2, since the payoff is not bounded. I suspect it wins at games 1 and 2, but not very strongly.
Edit: Why should we restrict attention to deterministic strategies? It is immediately clear that no deterministic strategy can outperform all other deterministic strategies, but it seems like compelling evidence in Solomonoff induction's favor if it outperforms any randomized computable strategy.
Sorry for the many replies, your comment continues to intrigue me.
Game 2 is different from games 1 and 3 because the available options/payoffs in game 2 also depend on your current utility or previous betting history - you cannot bet more than you've won so far. In general, if such things are allowed, there's no predictor that can win all games up to an additive or multiplicative constant, even when payoffs are bounded. Here's a game that shows why: on round 1 the player chooses x=1 or x=-1, then the universe chooses y=1 or y=-1, then the game effectively ...
Can a computable human beat a Solomonoff hyperintelligence at making predictions about an incoming sequence of bits? If the sequence is computable, he probably can't. I'm interested in what happens when the sequence can be uncomputable. The answer depends on what you mean by "beat".
Game 1: on each round you and Omega state your probabilities that the next bit will be 1. The logarithm of the probability you assigned to the actual outcome gets added to your score. (This setup is designed to incentivize players to report their true beliefs, see Eliezer's technical explanation.)
Game 2: you both start with a given sum of money. On each round you're allowed to bet some of it on 0 or 1 at 1:1 odds. You cannot go below zero. (This is the "martingale game", for motivation see the section on "constructive martingales" in the Wikipedia article on Martin-Löf randomness.)
Game 3: on each round you call out 0 or 1 for the next bit. If you guess right, you win 1 dollar, otherwise you lose 1 dollar. Going below zero is allowed. (This simple game was suggested by Wei Dai in this thread on one-logic.)
As it turns out, in game 1 you cannot beat Omega by more than an additive constant, even if the input sequence is uncomputable and you know its definition. (I have linked before to Shane Legg's text that can help you rederive this result.) Game 2 is a reformulation of game 1 in disguise, and you cannot beat Omega by more than a multiplicative constant. In game 3 you can beat Omega. More precisely, you can sometimes stay afloat while Omega sinks below zero at a linear rate.
Here's how. First let's set the input sequence to be very malevolent toward Omega: it will always say the reverse of what Omega is projected to say based on the previous bits. As for the human, all he has to do is either always say 0 or always say 1. Intuitively it seems likely that at least one of those strategies will stay afloat, because whenever one of them sinks, the other rises.
So is Solomonoff induction really the shining jewel at the end of all science and progress, or does that depend on the payoff setup? It's not clear to me whether our own universe is computable. In the thread linked above Eliezer argued that we should be trying to approximate Solomonoff inference anyway:
Eliezer's argument sounds convincing, but to actually work it must rely on some prior over all of math, including uncomputable universes, to justify the rarity of such "devilish" or "adversarial" situations. I don't know of any prior over all of math, and Wei's restating of Berry's paradox (also linked above) seems to show that inventing such a prior is futile. So we seem to lack any formal justification for adopting the Solomonoff distribution in reasoning about physics etc., unless I'm being stupid and missing something really obvious again.
(posting this to discussion because I'm no longer convinced that my mathy posts belong in the toplevel)