Wednesday, February 12, 2003, 3:34:31 AM, Shane Legg wrote: Shane, thanks for the explanation of Kolmogorov complexity and its relation to the matter at hand.
[On a side note, I'm curious whether and if so, how, lossy compression might relate. It would seem that in a number of cases a simpler algorithm than expresses exactly the behaviour could be valuable in that it expresses 95% of the behaviour of the environment being studied -- and if such an algorithm can be derived at far lower cost in a certain case, it would be worth it. Are issues like this addressed in the AIXI model or does it all deal with perfect prediction?] CS> In fact -- would the chess-reward pattern's unpredictability *itself* CS> be an indication of life? I.e., doesn't Ockham's razor fail in the CS> case of, and possibly *only* in the case of, conscious beings*? SL> I don't see what you are getting at here. You might need to explain SL> some more. (I understand Ockham's razor, you don't need to explain SL> that part; actually it comes up a lot in the theory behind Solomonoff SL> induction and AIXI...) What I'm getting at is an attempt at an external definition or at least telltale of conscious behaviour as either "that which is not compressible" or "that which although apparently compressible for some period, suddenly changes later" or perhaps "that which is not compressible to less than X% of the original data" where X is some largeish number like 60-90. The reason I'm thinking in these terms is because I suspected Ockham's razor to relate to the compressibility idea as you stated; and I've always felt Ockham's razor is out of place when dealing with conscious behaviour. To wit: the razor is often invoked in response to what many denigratingly label "conspiracy theory", while in my estimation conspiring is perfectly normal behaviour for humans (from surprise birthdays to price-fixing to assassinations), and even in some senses for (some) animals (the false eyes on peacock's tales and the merging into the background of the chameleon). That is to say, the "the simplest explanation is right" heuristic tends to break down in the presence of life -- and the more so the more the life is conscious. Because among the things that it is conscious of is that it *can be* and *is* being observed, and (often) wishes to mislead observers. So I suspect there's some sort of relationship between lack of compressibility and life's "anti-entropic urge" (for lack of a better term) about which I'm wondering whether something interesting can be stated mathematically -- e.g., if it's not (easily? at some level of complexity?) compressible, it must/might be alive. -- Cliff ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
