Physical significance is not a part of predicting. The implementation details can differ vastly between different machines anyway. Call it what it is: a physics simulator written entirely in brainfuck, most of the code having to do with difficulty of coding things in brainfuck and having nothing to do with physics. Calling it a hypothesis makes you confuse it with what we get when we are striving to understand what actually really exists. Which we achieve by things such as not confusing the way we compute something, with the general laws something follows.
Also, an example of non-deterministic sequence. Let’s suppose the sequence consists of lengths of 0s separated by 1s, with the length of consecutive 0s following a (truly random) binomial distribution with p=0.5 and n=20.
There will be a short prefix that works as following pseudocode:
loader sequence that loads following stuff as code from the input and then runs it:
loop forever:
loop for 20 steps:
read a from input
if a==0 print '0'
end loop
print '1'
end loop
and for a given output tape, this prefix will be the beginning of a fairly large fraction of the input tapes that produce given output tape, giving it a large prior, in the sense that the probability that the input tape that produces desired output begins with it, is big, compared to other contenders.
edit: i give up, markdown is completely retarded and eats all the indentation. edit2: also, restricting to programs that halt make the programs predict arbitrary doomsdays for no reason whatsoever, so I’m only considering formalisms where it is not restricted to programs that do halt.
What’s the physical significance of those infinite bits?
Physical significance is not a part of predicting. The implementation details can differ vastly between different machines anyway. Call it what it is: a physics simulator written entirely in brainfuck, most of the code having to do with difficulty of coding things in brainfuck and having nothing to do with physics. Calling it a hypothesis makes you confuse it with what we get when we are striving to understand what actually really exists. Which we achieve by things such as not confusing the way we compute something, with the general laws something follows.
Also, an example of non-deterministic sequence. Let’s suppose the sequence consists of lengths of 0s separated by 1s, with the length of consecutive 0s following a (truly random) binomial distribution with p=0.5 and n=20.
There will be a short prefix that works as following pseudocode:
and for a given output tape, this prefix will be the beginning of a fairly large fraction of the input tapes that produce given output tape, giving it a large prior, in the sense that the probability that the input tape that produces desired output begins with it, is big, compared to other contenders.
edit: i give up, markdown is completely retarded and eats all the indentation. edit2: also, restricting to programs that halt make the programs predict arbitrary doomsdays for no reason whatsoever, so I’m only considering formalisms where it is not restricted to programs that do halt.
http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=348
what was weird is that the first line did get indented with 1 more space than the rest.
That’s an awesome expression.