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.

rwallace comments on Polarized gamma rays and manifest infinity - Less Wrong Discussion

16 Post author: rwallace 30 July 2011 06:56AM

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

Comments (50)

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

Comment author: rwallace 30 July 2011 09:46:16PM 1 point [-]

That may indeed end up being the best solution to the problem. On the other hand, what formal language do we write such definitions in? SI already has the limitation that you have to supply a basis of computation, the choice of which weakly affects the result (additive constant on Kolmogorov complexity (in practice small), multiplicative constant on measure). Is there a way to use definitions which are not necessarily algorithms, so as to get a formally precise result without making this limitation much worse?

Comment author: DanielLC 31 July 2011 12:10:26AM 0 points [-]

It's an attempt to make the limitation only that bad. They will only be guaranteed to differ by a constant if both languages are equivalent. If you choose between a Turing machine and a Turing machine with a halting oracle, the former will at best beat the latter by a constant, but the latter can beat the former infinitely.

You obviously can't get it to work for all possible oracles, as there are uncountably infinite of them, but you can at least to it for all definable oracles, which is what this is.