On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 02:34:08PM -0800, meekerdb wrote: > On 1/19/2014 1:17 PM, Russell Standish wrote: > >> > >If a rational agent can compute its utility to determine its next > >course of action, then so can any observer with access to the same > >environmental information. > > > >Its got nothing to do with the Halting problem. > > > No, it does because calculating all the consequences one's next > action may be (and practically is) a non-halting problem. > > Brent >
The predictions that matter occur over a finite duration - eg the time duration of a turn, or the next day of trading on the stock exchange. It doesn't matter if the rational agent goes into an infinite loop (ie crashes using Bruno's terminology), or merely takes too long to make a decision, one can predict that the agent will not be able to make a timely decision based on computing the utility, and terminating the calulation if does not return in sufficient time. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
