You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

atucker comments on Example decision theory problem: "Agent simulates predictor" - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: cousin_it 19 May 2011 03:16PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (76)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: atucker 19 May 2011 05:56:44PM 0 points [-]

The N < M is necessary to guarantee that the agent predicts the predictor's proof, right?

What happens if the outlined proof is more than N symbols long?

Comment author: cousin_it 19 May 2011 06:02:01PM *  1 point [-]

The N < M is necessary to guarantee that the agent predicts the predictor's proof, right?

Yeah. Actually, N must be exponentially smaller than M, so the agent's proofs can completely simulate the predictor's execution.

What happens if the outlined proof is more than N symbols long?

No idea. :-) Maybe the predictor will fail to prove anything, and fall back to filling only one box, I guess? Anyway, the outlined proof is quite short, so the problem already arises for not very large values of N.