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SilasBarta comments on Shane Legg's Thesis: Machine Superintelligence, Opinions? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Zetetic 08 May 2011 08:04PM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 11 May 2011 11:07:36PM *  1 point [-]

I don't know if this contradicts you, but this is a problem that biological brain/eye systems have to solve ("inverse optics"), and Steven Pinker has an excellect discussion of it from a Bayesian perspective in his book How the Mind Works. He mentions that the brain does heavily rely on priors that match our environment, which significantly narrows down the possible scenes that could "explain" a given retinal image pair. (You get optical illusions when a scene violates these assumptions.)

Comment author: paulfchristiano 12 May 2011 05:22:53AM 0 points [-]

There are two parts to the problem: one is designing a model that describes the world well, and the other is using that model to infer things about the world from data. I agree that Bayesian is the correct adjective to apply to this process, but not necessarily that modeling the world is the most interesting part.