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Vaniver comments on Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 02 March 2015 08:19AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 05 March 2015 02:56:27PM *  1 point [-]

I think I've found the core of our disagreement. I want an algorithm that considers all possible paths through time. It decides on a set of actions, not just for the current time step, but for all possible future time steps.

So, I think you might be interested in UDT. (I'm not sure what the current best reference for that is.) I think that this requires actual omniscience, and so is not a good place to look for decision algorithms.

(Though I should add that typically utilities are defined over world-histories, and so any decision algorithm typically identifies classes of 'equivalent' actions, i.e. acknowledges that this is a thing that needs to be accepted somehow.)

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 05 March 2015 06:56:04PM 2 points [-]

UDT is overkill. The idea that all future choices can be collapsed into a single choice appears in the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern, but is probably much older.