On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 10:40 PM Steve Richfield via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > > In the space of real world "problems", I suspect the distribution of > difficulty follows the Zipf function, like pretty much everything else does.
A Zipf distribution is a power law distribution. The reason that power law distributions are so common over different domains (for example, wealth distribution or population of cities) is the same reason that Gaussian normal distributions are common. When you add a large set of small random variables, the result is Gaussian by the central limit theorem. When you multiply instead of add, you get a power law distribution, which is the exponential of a Gaussian. It happens whenever small random variations are in proportion to the magnitude of the variable. So yes, the distribution of problem difficulty over broad domains is Zipf or power law. It is why intelligence (as measured by problem solving ability) is proportional to the log of computing power. The value of intelligent systems grows linearly while their power grows exponentially by Moore's law. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T5ada390c367596a4-M432524776ff7350a3bc031bf Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups
