Silas

Well, now you f*in' tell me.

When I saw the picture, I assumed she was the woman you described in one of your Bayesian conspiracy stories that you post here. But then, she was in a pink jumpsuit, and had, I think, blond hair.

@Daniel_Franke: I was just describing a sufficient, not a necessary condition. I'm sure you can ethically get away with less. My point was just that, once you can make models that detailed, you needn't be prevented from using them altogether, because you wouldn't necessarily have to kill them (i.e. give them information-theoretic death) at any point.

@Tim_Tyler:

The main problem with death is that valuable things get lost. Once people are digital, this problem tends to go away - since you can relatively easily scan their brains - and preserve anything of genuine value. In summary, I don't see why this issue would be much of a problem.

I was going to say something similar, myself. All you have to do is constrain the FAI so that it's free to create any person-level models it wants, as long as it also reserves enough computational resources to preserve a copy so that the model citizen can later be re-... (read more)

Khyre: Setting or clearing a bit register regardless of what was there before is a one-bit irreversible operation (the other two one-bit input, one-bit output functions are constant 1 and constant 0).

face-palm I can't believe I missed that. Thanks for the correction :-)

Anyway, with that in mind, Landauer's principle has the strange implication that resetting anything to a known state, in such a way that the previous can't be retrieved, necessarily releases heat, and the more information the state conveys to the observer, the more heat is released. Okay, end threadjack...

I'm going to nitpick (mainly because of how much reading I've been doing about thermodynamics and information theory since your engines of cognition post):

Human neurons ... dissipate around a million times the heat per synaptic operation as the thermodynamic minimum for a one-bit operation at room temperature. ... it ought to be possible to run a brain at a million times the speed without ... invoking reversible computing or quantum computing.

I think you mean neurons dissipate a million times the thermodynamic minimum for an irreversible one-bit operat... (read more)

Nick_Tarleton: I think you're going a bit too far there. Stability control theory had by that time been rigorously and scientifically studied, dating back to Watts's flyball governor in the 18th century (which controlled shaft rotation speed by allowing a ball to swing out and increase rotational inertia as it sped up) and probably even before that with the incubator (which used heat to move a valve that allowed just the right amount of cooling air in). Then all throughout the 19th century engineers attacked the problem of "hunting" on trains, ... (read more)

@Scott_Aaronson: Previously, you had said the problem is solved with certainty after O(1) queries (which you had to, to satisfy the objection). Now, you're saying that after O(1) queries, it's merely a "high probability". Did you not change which claim you were defending?

Second, how can the required number of queries not depend on the problem size?

Finally, isn't your example a special case of exactly the situation Eliezer_Yudkowsky describes in this post? In it, he pointed out that the "worst case" corresponds to an adversary who kno... (read more)

Could Scott_Aaronson or anyone who knows what he's talking about, please tell me the name of the n/4 left/right bits problem he's referring to, or otherwise give me a reference for it? His explanation doesn't seem to make sense: the deterministic algorithm needs to examine 1+n/4 bits only in the worst case, so you can't compare that to the average output of the random algorithm. (Average case for the determistic would, it seems, be n/8 + 1) Furthermore, I don't understand how the random method could average out to a size-independent constant.

Is the randomized algorithm one that uses a quantum computer or something?

Someone please tell me if I understand this post correctly. Here is my attempt to summarize it:

"The two textbook results are results specifically about the worst case. But you only encounter the worst case when the environment can extract the maximum amount of knowledge it can about your 'experts', and exploits this knowledge to worsen your results. For this case (and nearby similar ones) only, randomizing your algorithm helps, but only because it destroys the ability of this 'adversary' to learn about your experts. If you instead average over all cases, the non-random algorithm works better."

Is that the argument?

@Caledonian and Tiiba: If we knew where the image was, we wouldn't need the dots.

Okay, let's take a step back: the scenario, as Caledonian originally stated, was that the museum people could make a patron better see the image if the museum people put random dots on the image. (Pronouns avoided for clarity.) So, the problem is framed as whether you can make someone else see an image that you already know is there, by somehow exploiting randomness. My response is that, if you already know the image is there, you can improve beyond randomness, but just put... (read more)

@Joshua_Simmons: I got to thinking about that idea as I read today's post, but I think Eliezer_Yudkowsky answered it therein: Yes, it's important to expirment, but why must your selection of what to try out, be random? You should be able to do better by exploiting all of your knowledge about the structure of the space, so as to pick better ways to experiment. To the extent that your non-random choices of what to test do worse than random, it is because your understanding of the problem is so poor as to be worse than random.

(And of course, the only time w... (read more)

So, in short: "Randomness is like poison: Yes, it can benefit you, but only if you feed it to people you don't like."

Will_Pearson: Is it literally? Are you saying I couldn't send a message to someone that enabled them to print out a list of the first hundred integers without referencing a human's cognitive structure.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. It's counterintuitive because you so effortlessly refernce others' cognitive structures. In communicating, you assume a certain amount of common understanding, which allows you to know whehter your message will be understood. In sending such a message, you rely on that information. You would have to think, "will they unde... (read more)

Okay, fair challenge.

I agree about your metal example, but it differs significantly from my discussion of the list-output program for the non-trivial reason I gave: specifically, the output is defined by its impact on people's cognitive structure.

Look at it this way: Tim_Tyler claims that I know everything there is to know about the output of a program that spits out the integers from 1 to 100. But, when I get the output, what makes me agree that I am in fact looking at those integers? Let's say that when printing it out (my argument can be converted to ... (read more)

Further analysis, you say, Tim_Tyler? Could you please redirect effort away from putdowns and into finding what was wrong with the reasoning in my previous comment?

Very worthwhile points, Tim_Tyler.

First of all, the reason for my spirited defense of MH's statement is that looked like a good theory because of how concise it was, and how consistent with my knowledge of programs it was. So, I upped my prior on it and tended to see apparent failures of it as a sign I'm not applying it correctly, and that further analysis could yield a useful insight.

And I think I that belief is turning out to be true:

It seems to specify that the output is what is unknown - not the sensations that output generates in any particular obser... (read more)

@Eliezer_Yudkowsky: It wouldn't be an exact sequence repeating, since the program would have to handle contingencies, like cows being uncooperative because of insufficiently stimulating conversation.

Nick_Tarleton: Actually, Tim_Tyler's claim would still be true there, because you may want to print out that list, even if you knew some exact arrangement of atoms with that property.

However, I think Marcello's Rule is still valid there and survives Tim_Tyler's objection: in that case, what you don't know is "the sensation arising from looking at a the numbers 1 through 100 prettily printed". Even if you had seen such a list before, you probably would want to print it out unless your memory were perfect.

My claim generalizes nicely. For example,... (read more)

Quick question: How would you build something smarter, in a general sense, than yourself? I'm not doubting that it's possible, I'm just interested in knowing the specific process one would use.

Keep it brief, please. ;-)