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jacob_cannell comments on Anatomy of Multiversal Utility Functions: Tegmark Level IV - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: Squark 07 February 2015 04:28PM

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Comment author: jacob_cannell 03 July 2015 08:13:29AM *  0 points [-]

I'm having trouble understanding how you identify 'life rules' and 'gliders' in arbitrary universes encoded as arbitrary turing machines.

You say:

To accomplish this, fix a way f to bijectively encode histories of V as binary sequences. Allow arbitrary histories: don't impose Game of Life rules.

where V is the 'forward light cone'

And then:

Here W(h) is the set of cells h in which satisfies Game of Life rules,

You use W(f^-1 (x) ) to represent the idea of mapping an arbitrary universe history represented as a bit sequence x into your W function which somehow detects the set of cells satisfying game of life rules.

I think I get your idea ... but how do you actually imagine this function would work?

Defining what constitutes a 'thing' across any universe is ... hard. Can your W(..) function recognize cells in a game of life running on my computer? ( once you have established or defined 'cells' , recognizing gliders is of course easy)

In other words, how do you ground these symbols so that it works across the multiverse?

Comment author: Squark 09 July 2015 06:22:42PM 0 points [-]

Hi Jacob!

Suppose P is a program generating some binary description X of our universe. Suppose h is a program which extracts the cell values of the game of life on your computer from X in a format compatible with f. h is relatively low complexity since apparently the cell values are "naturally" encoded in the physical universe. Therefore the composition of h and P will have a significant contribution to the Solomonoff expectation value and the agent will take it into account (since it lives in our universe and therefore makes decisions logically correlated with X).