From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 18:24:13 MDT
> We were speaking of Occam's Razor, weren't we? If the
> information content
> *relative to Occam's Razor* and the question of the "simplest hypothesis"
> is to be measured in anything other than the Kolmogorov complexity, I
> think Messieurs Solomonoff and Hutter would wish to know about it. I
> certainly don't think the "amount of pattern present" is the right
> criterion for Occam's Razor! We want the simplest explanation, not the
> most boring description.
Sure.. which is why the universe filled with hypothetical *undetectable*
aliens with Jennifer Lopez butts, Michael Jackson noses, and Dubya earlobes
is an unlikely universe -- it may have lots of interesting patterns, but
it's needlessly complex ...
I was just reacting to the notion that the integers as a whole are "simpler"
than individual large integers. While this statement reflects a deep
mathematical fact, it's also a bit of a play on words, as the mathematical
notion of simplicity involved is somewhat counterintuitive, and it not the
only interesting mathematical notion fo simplicity...
ben g
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