Re: Optimal Prediction

From: Bill Jefferys <bill.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 10:44:41 -0500

It's pointless wasting my time on this. As both Russell and I pointed
out, this is a standard example that is cited by people who are
knowledgeable about the AP. Either you have a different definition of
predictive power than the rest of us do, or you don't understand
Hoyle's very clearly written paper. In either case, it would be
foolish of me to continue the thread.

Goodbye. <plonk>

Bill

"Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."

At 10:19 AM +0100 3/28/02, Juergen Schmidhuber wrote:
>Bill Jefferys wrote:
>>
>> At 9:19 AM +0100 3/27/02, Juergen Schmidhuber wrote:
>> >You are claiming the AP necessarily implies a specific fact about
>> >nuclear energy levels? I greatly doubt that - can you give a proof?
>>
>> Yes, I can.
>>
>>
>>http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1954ApJS....1..121H&db_key=AST&high=06070
>>
>> This is the classic paper where Hoyle shows this. It has been cited
>> repeatedly in the literature on the AP as an example of a genuine
>> prediction of the AP. For example, Barrow and Tipler cite it in their
>> book.
>
>Being sceptical about proof by citation, I failed to find such a
>mathematical proof in this paper. Its predictions are based on
>approximations and assumptions (the authors do acknowlege this)
>besides the AP. Where exactly do you think is the proof?
>
>Predictions that later turn out to be correct demonstrate predictive
>power of the sum of all assumptions, not of AP by itself.
>
>> I don't care about flying rabbits. Stick to the issue at hand.
>
>This was the issue in the original message.
>
>At the risk of beating a dead horse: plain AP does not exclude
>continuations of your world with different physical laws, as long as
>your self survives. Who knows - maybe you could live on in a crude
>simulation that completes ignores the concept of energy levels.
>
>To make nontrivial predictions you clearly need more than the AP.
>The theory of inductive inference provides what is missing:
>http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html
>
>Juergen
Received on Thu Mar 28 2002 - 07:47:30 PST

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