...but the action could be a natural number, no? It’s entirely OK if there is no maximum—the available computational resources then limit how good a strategy the agent manages to implement (“Define as big a natural number as you can!”). The “algorithm” is descriptive, it’s really a definition of optimality of a decision, not specification of how this decision is to be computed. You can sometimes optimize infinities away, and can almost always find a finite approximation that gets better with more resources and ingenuity.
The “algorithm” is descriptive, it’s really a definition of optimality of a decision, not specification of how this decision is to be computed. You can sometimes optimize infinities away, and can almost always find a finite approximation that gets better with more resources and ingenuity.
Okay. I didn’t know that the specification of how to compute was explicitly understood to be incomplete in this way. Of course, the description could only be improved by being more specific about just when you can “sometimes optimize infinities away, and can almost always find a finite approximation that gets better with more resources and ingenuity.”
...but the action could be a natural number, no? It’s entirely OK if there is no maximum—the available computational resources then limit how good a strategy the agent manages to implement (“Define as big a natural number as you can!”). The “algorithm” is descriptive, it’s really a definition of optimality of a decision, not specification of how this decision is to be computed. You can sometimes optimize infinities away, and can almost always find a finite approximation that gets better with more resources and ingenuity.
Okay. I didn’t know that the specification of how to compute was explicitly understood to be incomplete in this way. Of course, the description could only be improved by being more specific about just when you can “sometimes optimize infinities away, and can almost always find a finite approximation that gets better with more resources and ingenuity.”