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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Can noise have power? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: lukeprog 23 May 2014 04:54AM

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Comment author: asr 23 May 2014 02:01:12PM 5 points [-]

Eliezer thinks the phrase 'worst case analysis' should refer to the 'omega' case.

"Worst case analysis" is a standard term of art in computer science, that shows up as early as second-semester programming, and Eliezer will be better understood if he uses the standard term in the standard way.

A computer scientist would not describe the "omega" case as random -- if the input is correlated with the random number source in a way that is detectable by the algorithm, they're by definition not random.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 June 2014 05:55:48AM 1 point [-]

I did not propose that worst case be interpreted as Omega or that it be given any nonstandard referent. I did suggest that "worst case" to describe the Adversary scenario is deceptive to readers, and we should ReplaceTheSymbolWithTheSubstance via a more descriptive phrase like "adversarial superintelligence that knows everything except the bits designated random". This is what the phrase standardly means in computer science, but calling this "worst case analysis" seems to me deceptive, especially if we're trying to conduct a meta-ish debate about the benefits of randomization, rather than talking about some particular algorithm.