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A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction — AI Alignment Forum

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(Originally posted in December 2015: A dialogue between Ashley, a computer scientist who's never heard of Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference, and Blaine, who thinks it is the best thing since sliced bread.) ASHLEY: Good evening, Msr. Blaine. BLAINE: Good evening, Msr. Ashley. ASHLEY: I've heard there's this thing called "Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference". BLAINE: The rumors have spread, then. ASHLEY: Yeah, so, what the heck is that about? BLAINE: Invented in the 1960s by the mathematician Ray Solomonoff, the key idea in Solomonoff induction is to do sequence prediction by using Bayesian updating on a prior composed of a mixture of all computable probability distributions— ASHLEY: Wait. Back up a lot. Before you try to explain what Solomonoff induction is, I'd like you to try to tell me what it does, or why people study it in the first place. I find that helps me organize my listening. Right now I don't even know why I should be interested in this. BLAINE: Um,

x A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction — AI Alignment Forum Solomonoff induction Occam's Razor Dialogue (format) AI Rationality World Modeling Curated 33 A Semitechnical Introductory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction by Eliezer Yudkowsky 4th Mar 2021 65 min read 32 33 ( Originally posted in December 2015: A dialogue between Ashley, a computer scientist who's never heard of Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference , and Blaine, who thinks it is the best thing since sliced bread. ) i. Unbounded analysis ASHLEY: Good evening, Msr. Blaine. BLAINE: Good evening, Msr. Ashle

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