On 6/21/08, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Eliezer asked a similar question on SL4. If an agent flips a fair quantum > coin and is copied 10 times if it comes up heads, what should be the agent's > subjective probability that the coin will come up heads? By the anthropic > principle, it should be 0.9. That is because if you repeat the experiment > many times and you randomly sample one of the resulting agents, it is highly > likely that will have seen heads about 90% of the time.
That's the wrong answer, though (as I believe I pointed out when the question was asked over on SL4). The copying is just a red herring, it doesn't affect the probability at all. Since this question seems to confuse many people, I wrote a short Python program simulating it: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/Random/copies.py Set the number of trials to whatever you like (if it's high, you might want to comment out the "A randomly chosen agent has seen..." lines to make it run faster) - the ratio will converge to 1:1 on any higher amount of trials. -- http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/ | http://xuenay.livejournal.com/ Organizations worth your time: http://www.singinst.org/ | http://www.crnano.org/ | http://www.mfoundation.org/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
