I thank you for your effort! I am currently missing a lot of the mathematical background necessary to make that post make sense, but I will revisit it if I find myself with the motivation to learn!
Optimization Process
Karma: 614
This is a good point! I’ll send you $20 if you send me your PayPal/Venmo/ETH/??? handle. (In my flailings, I’d stumbled upon this “fractional step” business, but I don’t think I thought about it as hard as it deserved.)
How are you defining “basically equivalent”
Nyeeeh, unfortunately, sort of “I know it when I see it.” It’s kinda neat being able to take a fractional step of a classical elementary CA, but I’m dissatisfied because… ah, because the long-run behavior of the fractional-step operator is basically indistinguishable from the long-run behavior of the corresponding classical CA.
So, tentative operationalization of “basically equivalent”: is “basically equivalent” to a classical elementary CA if the long-run behavior of is very close to the long-run behavior of some , i.e., uh,
...but I can already think of at least one flaw in this operationalization, so, uh, I’m not sure. (Sorry! This being so fuzzy in my head is why I’m asking for help!)
I was imagining the tape wraps around! (And hoping that whatever results fell out would port straightforwardly to infinite tapes.)
I’ve never been familiar enough with group-theory stuff to memorize the names (which, warning, also might mean that it will take you a lot of time to write a sufficiently-dumbed-down version), but the internet suggests is related to… the Minkowski metric? I would be flabbergasted to learn that something so specific-to-our-universe was relevant to this toy mathematical contraption.
I think compared to the literature you’re using an overly restrictive and nonstandard definition of quantum cellular automata.
That makes sense! I’m searching for the simplest cellular-automaton-like thing that’s still interesting to study. I may have gone too far in the “simple” direction; but I’d like to understand why this highly-restricted subset of QCAs is too simple.
Specifically, it only makes sense to me to write as a product of operators like you have if all of the terms are on spatially disjoint regions.
Hmm! That’s not obvious to me; if there’s some general insight like “no operator containing two ~‘partially overlapping’ terms like can be unitary,” I’d happily pay for that!
Things have coalesced near the amphitheater. When the music kicks off again, we’ll go northeast to… approximately here. 47.6309473, −122.3165802 JMJM+99F Seattle, Washington
Announcement 1: I, the organizer, will be 5-10min late. Announcement 2: apparently there’s some music thing happening at the amphitheater! I’ll set up somewhere northeast of the amphitheater when I get there, and post more precise coordinates when I have.
$10 bounty for anybody coming / passing through Capitol Hill: pick up a blind would-be attendee outside the Zeek’s Pizza by 19th and Mercer. DM me your contact information, and I’ll put you in touch, and I’ll pay you on your joint arrival.
Update: the library is unexpectedly closed due to staffing issues. The event is now at Fuel Coffee, one block south and across the street.
If the chance of rain is dissuading you: fear not, there’s a newly constructed roof over the amphitheater!
Hey, folks! PSA: looks like there’s a 50% chance of rain today. Plan A is for it to not rain; plan B is to meet in the rain.
See you soon, I hope!
You win both of the bounties I precommitted to!
Lovely! Yeah, that rhymes and scans well enough for me!
Here are my experiments; they’re pretty good, but I don’t count them as “reliably” scanning. So I think I’m gonna count this one as a win!
(I haven’t tried testing my chess prediction yet, but here it is on ASCII-art mazes.)
I found this lens very interesting!
Upon reflection, though, I begin to be skeptical that “selection” is any different from “reward.”
Consider the description of model-training:To motivate this, let’s view the above process not from the vantage point of the overall training loop but from the perspective of the model itself. For the purposes of demonstration, let’s assume the model is a conscious and coherent entity. From it’s perspective, the above process looks like:
Waking up with no memories in an environment.
Taking a bunch of actions.
Suddenly falling unconscious.
Waking up with no memories in an environment.
Taking a bunch of actions.
and so on.....
The model never “sees” the reward. Each time it wakes up in an environment, its cognition has been altered slightly such that it is more likely to take certain actions than it was before.
What distinguishes this from how my brain works? The above is pretty much exactly what happens to my brain every millisecond:
It wakes up in an environment, with no memories[1]; just a raw causal process mapping inputs to outputs.
It receives some inputs, and produces some outputs.
It’s replaced with a new version—almost identical to the old version, but with some synapse weights and activation states tweaked via simple, local operations.
It wakes up in an environment...
and so on...
Why say that I “see” reward, but the model doesn’t?
- ^
Is it cheating to say this? I don’t think so. Both I and GPT-3 saw the sentence “Paris is the capital of France” in the past; both of us had our synapse weights tweaked as a result; and now both of us can tell you the capital of France. If we’re saying that the model doesn’t “have memories,” then, I propose, neither do I.
I was trying to say that the move used to justify the coin flip is the same move that is rejected in other contexts
Ah, that’s the crucial bit I was missing! Thanks for spelling it out.
Reflectively stable agents are updateless. When they make an observation, they do not limit their caring as though all the possible worlds where their observation differs do not exist.
This is very surprising to me! Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by “caring,” but: an agent who’s made one observation is utterly unable[1] to interact with the other possible-worlds where the observation differed; and it seems crazy[1] to choose your actions based on something they can’t affect; and “not choosing my actions based on X” is how I would define “not caring about X.”
- ^
Aside from “my decisions might be logically-correlated with decisions that agents in those worlds make (e.g. clone-prisoner’s-dilemma),” or “I am locked into certain decisions that a CDT agent would call suboptimal, because of a precommitment I made (e.g. Newcomb)” or other fancy decision-theoretic stuff. But that doesn’t seem relevant to Eliezer’s lever-coin-flip scenario you link to?
- ^
Ben Garfinkel: no bounty, sorry! It’s definitely arguing in a “capabilities research isn’t bad” direction, but it’s very specific and kind of in the weeds.
Barak & Edelman: I have very mixed feelings about this one, but… yeah, I think it’s bounty-worthy.
Kaj Sotala: solid. Bounty!
Drexler: Bounty!
Olah: hrrm, no bounty, I think: it argues that a particular sort of AI research is good, but seems to concede the point that pure capabilities research is bad. (“Doesn’t [interpretability improvement] speed up capabilities? Yes, it probably does—and Chris agrees that there’s a negative component to that—but he’s willing to bet that the positives outweigh the negatives.”)
I have an Anki deck in which I’ve half-heartedly accumulated important quantities. Here are mine! (I keep them all as log10(value in kilogram/meter/second/dollar/whatever seems natural), to make multiplication easy.)