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casebash comments on The Number Choosing Game: Against the existence of perfect theoretical rationality - Less Wrong Discussion

-1 Post author: casebash 29 January 2016 01:04AM

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Comment author: casebash 06 January 2016 12:23:20PM 0 points [-]

So an agent that chooses only 1 utility could still be a perfectly rational agent in your books?

Comment author: kithpendragon 06 January 2016 12:49:43PM *  0 points [-]

Might be. Maybe that agent's utility function is actually bounded at 1 (it's not trying to maximize, after all). Perhaps it wants 100 utility, but already has firm plans to get the other 99. Maybe it chose a value at random from the range of all positive real numbers (distributed such that the probability of choosing X grows proportional to X) and pre-committed to the results, thus guaranteeing a stopping condition with unbounded expected return. Since it was missing out on unbounded utility in any case, getting literally any is better than none, but the difference between x and y is not really interesting.

(humorously) Maybe it just has better things to do than measuring its *ahem* stopping function against the other agents.