Re: The Relevance of Complex Systems [was: Re: Retrenchment]

From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Thu Sep 08 2005 - 09:16:02 MDT


Ben Goertzel wrote:

> Eli:
>
>> >> I bet that if you name three subtleties, I can
>> >> describe how Bayes plus expected utility plus Solomonoff
>> >> (= AIXI) would do it given infinite computing power.
>
> Of course, but who cares what can be done using infinite computing power?

What about mathematics? I don't think we know how to do mathematics under a
Bayesian framework, even with infinite computing power (since some
mathematical statements can be neither proved nor disproved from the usual
axioms). I noticed that nobody replied to my "uncertainty in mathematics"
post (http://sl4.org/archive/0508/12022.html).

In that post I used Goldbach's Conjecture as an example, but perhaps a
better one is P!=NP, which is a mathematical conjecture with many more real
world implications. I think most of us believe that P!=NP and act
accordingly, but it's not at all clear how to relate this to Bayesian
probabilities.



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