From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 15:03:42 MST
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0011/0011122.pdf
>
> I am not sure how many people have every visited this fellows webiste, but he
> has a newly published article, that has been released on the arxiv.org
> website (55-pages .PDF format). It seems to impact much of what sl4 examines.
>
> His personal website is at http://rapa.idsia.ch/~juergen/
People posting article references: Please include at least the title,
rather than just the blind link. (Sorry for not stating this earlier.)
==
ALGORITHMIC THEORIES OF EVERYTHING
Abstract:
We make the plausible assumption that the history of our universe is
formally
describable, and sampled from a formally describable probability
distribution on the
possible universe histories. To study the dramatic consequences for
observers evolving
within such a universe, we generalize the concepts of decidability,
halting problem,
Kolmogorov's algorithmic complexity, and Solomono 's algorithmic
probability. We
describe objects more random than Chaitin's halting probability of a
Turing machine,
show that there is a universal cumulatively enumerable measure (CEM) that
dominates
previous measures for inductive inference, prove that any CEM must assign
low proba-
bilities to universes without short enumerating programs, that any
describable measure
must assign low probabilities to universes without short descriptions, and
several sim-
ilar \Occam's razor theorems." Then we discuss the most ecient way of
computing
all universes based on Levin's optimal search algorithm, and make a
natural resource-
oriented postulate: the cumulative prior probability of all objects
incomputable within
time t by this optimal algorithm should be inversely proportional to t.
Wederivecon-
sequences for inductive inference, physics, and philosophy, predicting
that whatever
seems random is not, but in fact is computed by a short and fast algorithm
which will
probably halt before our universe is many times older than it is now.
==
It seems fairly obvious to me that our Universe's laws of physics are not
minimally efficient. The Game of Life is minimally efficient. Our laws
have a great deal of internal functional complexity. Personally, I
predict that state-vector reduction will turn out to be really and truly
fundamentally random - noncausal, acausal, a gap in the causality of the
Universe.
Still, it's a great line of reasoning, and if any characteristics of our
Universe show signs of having minimal informational complexity, I'd be
fascinated.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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