Though the ordinary “semi-formalization” of UDASSA seems to rely on Turing machines, which are already mathematical objects. I find the idea that there is some universal Turing machine endlessly running all programs in parallel (because to be clear, many never halt) that exists somewhere in the ether… a little unintuitive, personally, even as an AIT researcher.
Yeah, the observation that the universe seems maybe well-predicted by a program running on some UTM is a subset of the observation that the universe seems amendable to mathematical description and compression. So the former observation isn’t really an explanation for the latter, just a kind of restatement. We’d need an argument for why a prior over random programs running on an UTM should be preferred over a prior over random strings. Why does the universe have structure? The Universal Prior isn’t an answer to that question. It’s just an attempt to write down a sensible prior that takes the observation that the universe is structured and apparently predictable into account.
Hm, nice rabbit hole.
Though the ordinary “semi-formalization” of UDASSA seems to rely on Turing machines, which are already mathematical objects. I find the idea that there is some universal Turing machine endlessly running all programs in parallel (because to be clear, many never halt) that exists somewhere in the ether… a little unintuitive, personally, even as an AIT researcher.
Yeah, the observation that the universe seems maybe well-predicted by a program running on some UTM is a subset of the observation that the universe seems amendable to mathematical description and compression. So the former observation isn’t really an explanation for the latter, just a kind of restatement. We’d need an argument for why a prior over random programs running on an UTM should be preferred over a prior over random strings. Why does the universe have structure? The Universal Prior isn’t an answer to that question. It’s just an attempt to write down a sensible prior that takes the observation that the universe is structured and apparently predictable into account.