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.

eli_sennesh comments on The metaphor/myth of general intelligence - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 August 2014 04:04PM

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

Comments (51)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 November 2014 07:49:09AM *  0 points [-]

There are no free lunch theorems that show that no computable intelligences can perform well in all environments. As far as they go, these theorems are uninteresting, as we don't need intelligences that perform well in all environments, just in almost all/most.

They are also, in an important sense, false: the No Free Lunch theorem for statistical learning assumes that any underlying reality is as likely as any other (uniform distribution). Marcus Hutter published a paper years ago showing that when you make a simple Occam's Razor assumption, using the Solomonoff Measure over reality functions instead of a uniform distribution, you do, in fact, achieve a free lunch.

And of course, the Occam's Razor assumption is well-justified by the whole line of thought going from entropy in statistical mechanics through to both information-theoretic entropy and Kolmogorov complexity, viz: a simpler macrostate ("reality function" for classification/concept learning) can "be implemented by", emerge from, many microstates, so Occam's Razor and the Solomonoff Measure work in reductionist ontologies.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 13 November 2014 06:44:26PM 0 points [-]

The full Solomonoff measure is uncomputable. So a real-world AI would have a computable approximation of that measure, meaning that there are (rare) worlds that punish it badly.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 November 2014 11:24:14PM 0 points [-]

But you don't get the Free Lunch from the optimality of Solomonoff's Measure, but instead from the fact that it lets you avoid giving weight to the adversarial reality functions and distributions normally constructed in the proof of the NFL Theorem.