Comment author:gwern
07 June 2014 01:14:21AM
21 points
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This ties in well with the intelligence-as-compression paradigm: much of mathematics can be interpreted as a collection of very short programs, and so in a predictable universe with a bias towards short programs, it's unsurprising if a lot of them turn out to be useful somewhere or other.
Comment author:maxy
15 August 2014 05:27:09PM
0 points
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Those "very short programs" are useful even if the universe has no bias towards them. It's just Occam's razor. I think it has more to do with the process of knowledge gathering than with the universe itself.
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This ties in well with the intelligence-as-compression paradigm: much of mathematics can be interpreted as a collection of very short programs, and so in a predictable universe with a bias towards short programs, it's unsurprising if a lot of them turn out to be useful somewhere or other.
Those "very short programs" are useful even if the universe has no bias towards them. It's just Occam's razor. I think it has more to do with the process of knowledge gathering than with the universe itself.