On 20 Jan 2014, at 23:54, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:35:13AM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 19 Jan 2014, at 23:14, Russell Standish wrote:
Well yes, that is certainly arguable, and I'm indeed somewhat
critical
of the notion myself. But is not "my concept" - it is the accepted
concept from economics, game theory, decision theory, and artificial
intelligence - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent.
"a rational agent is an agent which has clear preferences, models
uncertainty via expected values, and always chooses to perform the
action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from among all
feasible actions."
If you think I am miscontruing anything on that page, I'd appreciate
it being pointed out. (note the term "utility" is called
"preferences"
in the Wikipedia article.
I would not trust wikipedia on such topics. Nor probably any
dictionary, which seems to me to be deeply irrational when
addressing the notion of rationality, or are just taking the
definition in fashion for some school of thought.
Sure - you're welcome to provide a citation to an alterative
formulation, and we can debate that, but the Wikipedia version appears
to be consistent with how the concept is used in the literature, and
also with a sample of pages from Plato.stanford.
The stanford dictionary is the less grave, imo.
I will accept evidence of a different interpretation where it is
clearly widely used. I don't see such evdence at present. Making up
your own definition doesn't count :).
Sure. But in a thread we can accept momentary definition for the sake
of the argument.
The problem of "rationalism" is that it is a very large and complex
notion.
My definition is that a machine is rational when, each time it
believes p and p -> q, he will not deny q.
That is very large, and probably not related with this thread. I still
feel that rationality and predictability are rather orthogonal notion,
though.
Bruno
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected]
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