VLADIMIR NESOV IN HIS  11/07/07 10:54 PM POST SAID

VLADIMIR>>>> “Hutter shows that prior can be selected rather arbitrarily
without giving up too much”

ED>>>> Yes.  I was wondering why the Solomonoff Induction paper made such
a big stink about picking the prior (and then came up which a choice that
struck me as being quite sub-optimal in most of the types of situations
humans deal with).  After you have a lot of data, you can derive the
equivalent of the prior from frequency data.  As the Solmononoff Induction
paper showed, using Bayesian formulas the effect of the prior fades off
fairly fast as data comes in.

(However, I have read that for complex probability distributions the
choice of the class of mathematical model you use to model the
distribution is part of the prior choosing issue, and can be important —
but that did not seem to be addressed in the Solomonoff Induction paper.
For example in some speech recognition each of the each speech frame model
has a pre-selected number of dimensions, such as FFT bins (or related
signal processing derivatives), and each dimension is not represented by a
Gausian but rather by a basis function comprised of a set of a selected
number of Gausians.)

It seems to me that when you don’t have much frequency data, we humans
normally make a guess based on the probability of similar things, as
suggested in the Kemp paper I cited.    It seems to me that is by far the
most commonsensical approach.  In fact, due to the virtual omnipreseance
of non-literal similarity in everything we see and hear, (e.g., the same
face virtually never hits V1 exactly the same) most of our probabilistic
thinking is dominated by similarity derived probabilities.

BEN GOERTZEL WROTE IN HIS Thu 11/8/2007 6:32 AM POST

BEN>>>> [referring the Vlad’s statement that about AIXI’s
uncomputability]“Now now, it doesn't require infinite resources -- the
AIXItl variant of AIXI only requires an insanely massive amount of
resources, more than would be feasible in the physical universe, but not
an infinite amount ;-) “

ED>>>> So, from a practical standpoint, which is all I really care about,
is it a dead end?

Also, do you, or anybody know, if  Solmononoff (the only way I can
remember the name is “Soul man on off” like Otis Redding with a microphone
problem) Induction have the ability of deal with deep forms of non-literal
similarity matching in is complexity calculations.  And is so how?  And if
not, isn’t it brain dead?  And if it is a brain dead why is such a bright
guy as Shane Legg spending his time on it.


YAN KINK YIN IN HIS 11/8/2007 9:16 AM POST SAID

YAN>>>> Is there any research that can tell us what kind of structures are
better for machine learning?  Or perhaps w.r.t a certain type of data?
Are there learning structures that will somehow "learn things faster"?

ED>>>>  Yes, brain science.  It may not point out the best possible
architecture, but it points out one that works.  Evolution is not
theoretical, and not totally optimal, but it is practical.  Systems like
Novamente which is loosely based on many key ideas from brain science
probably have a much more likely chance of getting useful stuff up and
running soon that any more theortical approaches, because the search space
has already been narrowed by many trillions of trials and errors over
hundreds of millions of years.

Ed Porter

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