After all, something in the generator must be keeping track of the passage of the marbles for you. Otherwise the generator would keep producing the same number over and over.
Randomness ‘degenerates’ (perhaps by action of a malicious daemon) into non-randomness, and so it can do better and no worse than a non-random approach?
(If the environments and agents are identical down to the source of randomness, then the agent defaults to a pure strategy; but with ‘genuine’ randomness, random sources that are different between instances of the agent, the agent can actually implement the better mixed strategy?)
I’m having trouble parsing your questions. You have some sentences that end in question marks. Are you asking whether I agree with those sentences? I’m having trouble understanding the assertions made by those sentences, so I can’t tell whether I agree with them (if that was what you were asking).
The claim that I was making could be summed up as follows. I described an agent using a PRNG to solve a problem involving painting marbles. The usual way to view such a solution is as
deterministic amnesiac agent PLUS randomness.
My suggestion was instead to view the solution as
deterministic amnesiac agent
PLUS
a particular kind of especially limited memory
PLUS
an algorithm that takes the contents of that memory as input and produces an output that is almost guaranteed to have a certain property.
The especially limited memory is the part of the PRNG that remembers what the next seed should be. If there weren’t some kind of memory involved in the PRNG’s operation, the PRNG would keep using the same seed over and over again, producing the same “random” number again and again.
The algorithm is the algorithm that the PRNG uses to turn the first seed into a sequence of pseudo-random numbers.
The certain property of that sequence is the property of having two-thirds of its terms being less than 2⁄3.
Randomness ‘degenerates’ (perhaps by action of a malicious daemon) into non-randomness, and so it can do better and no worse than a non-random approach?
(If the environments and agents are identical down to the source of randomness, then the agent defaults to a pure strategy; but with ‘genuine’ randomness, random sources that are different between instances of the agent, the agent can actually implement the better mixed strategy?)
I’m having trouble parsing your questions. You have some sentences that end in question marks. Are you asking whether I agree with those sentences? I’m having trouble understanding the assertions made by those sentences, so I can’t tell whether I agree with them (if that was what you were asking).
The claim that I was making could be summed up as follows. I described an agent using a PRNG to solve a problem involving painting marbles. The usual way to view such a solution is as
My suggestion was instead to view the solution as
The especially limited memory is the part of the PRNG that remembers what the next seed should be. If there weren’t some kind of memory involved in the PRNG’s operation, the PRNG would keep using the same seed over and over again, producing the same “random” number again and again.
The algorithm is the algorithm that the PRNG uses to turn the first seed into a sequence of pseudo-random numbers.
The certain property of that sequence is the property of having two-thirds of its terms being less than 2⁄3.
OK, that’s clearer. And different from what I thought you were saying.