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.

DanielLC comments on More and Less than Solomonoff Induction - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Manfred 21 May 2014 04:55AM

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

Comments (32)

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

Comment author: DanielLC 21 May 2014 09:55:56PM -1 points [-]

We know that the observable universe has a finite size. We can predict arbitrarily (but not infinitely) into the future and with an arbitrary (but not infinite) resolution with a finite model.

A true random number generator is equivalent to a lookup table built into the laws of physics, so long as you only pick a random number finitely many times.

In this case, that frequentist prediction you just quoted is worthless. Our predictions will be wrong a limited number of times only because we're dealing with a model that extends a limited distance into the future, and random numbers will only occur a limited number of times.

However, it works fine from a bayesian perspective. Once you figure out the main part of the program and just start building up the random number table, it will act the same as if you just told it the results would be random and to give probability distributions rather than just sets of possibilities.