Quinn

Karma: 282

Notes/blog posts on two recent MIRI papers

QuinnJul 14, 2013, 11:11 PM

35 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

Quinn Jul 14, 2013, 8:51 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: LessWrong help desk—free paper downloads and more
Thanks for looking! I’ll try to get my hands on a physical copy, as the Google Books version has highly distracting page omissions.

Quinn Jul 14, 2013, 10:02 AM
4 points
in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
Unless I’m going insane, Luke_A_Somers’ comment below is incorrect. If you defect and your opponent times out, you still get 1 point and they get 0, which is marginally better than both getting 1 point in the case of mutual defection.

That was the purpose my (sleep 9). I figured anyone who was going to eval me twice against anything other than CooperateBot is going to figure out that I’m a jerk and defect against me, so I’m only getting one point from them anyway. Might as well lower their score by 1.

My assumption might not have been correct though. In the original scoreboard, T (who times out against me) actually does cooperate with K, who defected against everybody!

The bizarre-looking always-false conditional was a long shot at detecting simulation. I heard an idea at a LW meetup (maybe from So8res?) that players might remove sleeps from each other’s code before calling eval. I figured I might as well fake such players out if there were any (there were not).

Quinn Jul 11, 2013, 10:47 PM
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
Yes, the “here’s why Quinn is wrong about CooperateBot being a troll submission” comments were valuable, so I don’t regret provoking them. Presumably if my comment had said “players” instead of “trolls” from the outset, it would have been ignored for being inoffensive and content-free.

But provoking a few good comments was a happy accident from my perspective. I will avoid casual use of the word “troll” on this site, unless I have a specific purpose in mind.

Quinn Jul 11, 2013, 7:25 PM
1 point
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
Yes, and I agree with this. I’m familiar with Straw Vulcanism and accept that guessing incorrectly is my mistake, not others’.

It seems anger and frustration were read into my comment, when in fact I was merely surprised, so I’ve edited out the offending t-word.

Quinn Jul 11, 2013, 8:17 AM
0 points
on: LessWrong help desk—free paper downloads and more
Ken Binmore & Hyun Song Shin. Algorithmic knowledge and game theory. (Chapter 9 of Knowledge, Belief, and Strategic Interaction by Cristina Bicchieri.)

EDIT: Actually, I’d be pretty happy to see any paper containing both the phrases “common knowledge” and “Löb’s theorem”. This particular paper is probably not the only one.

Quinn Jul 11, 2013, 5:41 AM
5 points
in reply to: defectbot’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
Thank you.

Quinn Jul 11, 2013, 5:39 AM
−2 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
Can you elaborate on this?

You are right that I used the inflammatory t-word because CooperateBot submitters are probably not trying to win. I certainly expected to see DefectBots (or CliqueBots from optimists), and agree that the competition should have been seeded with both CooperateBots and DefectBots.

But I don’t understand this at all:

But I find this a poor excuse. (It’s why I always give the maximum possible number whenever I play “guess 2/3rds of the average.”)

To me, this looks like t-wording the people who play 0.

Are we thinking of the same game, where the payout is constant?

Quinn Jul 10, 2013, 10:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: Prisoner’s dilemma tournament results
I was a bit irritated that no fewer than three players submitted CooperateBot, as I cooperated with it in hopes of tricking bots like submission B.

EDIT: More offense was taken at my use of the word “trolls” than was intended.

Quinn Jun 30, 2013, 11:05 PM
2 points
on: [LINK] Cantor’s theorem, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the halting problem
Of course, when you ignore the payoff matrix, the argument is no longer really about the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and so I don’t know that it’s fair to accuse the barber paradox of having a lot of extra cruft not present in the PD formulation).

But I agree that this is a cute presentation of diagonal arguments in culturally relevant terms. A fun read.

Quinn Jun 19, 2013, 2:18 AM
4 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
I’m glad you bring this up. I have two comments:

(1) The absoluteness argument shows that intermediate uses of Choice don’t matter. They happen (definably) in L, and the conclusion reflects back up to V.

(2) As you suspect, you don’t really need Choice for compactness of the Hilbert cube. Given a sequence in it, I can define a convergent subsequence by repeatedly pigeonholing infinitely many points into finitely many holes. I believe sequential compactness is what is needed for the Kakutani theorem.

Variants of open cover compactness are derivable from sequential compactness without Choice in Polish spaces, in case something like that is needed. Or if you somehow really need full open cover compactness… well, return to point (1), I guess.

Quinn Jun 18, 2013, 11:12 PM
4 points
on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
I gave this paper a pretty thorough read-through, and decided that the best way to really see what was going on would be to write it all down, expanding the most interesting arguments and collapsing others. This has been my main strategy for learning math for a while now, but I just decided recently that I ought to start a blog for this kind of thing. Although I wrote this post mainly for myself, it might be helpful for anyone else who’s interested in reading the paper.

Towards the end, I note that the result can be made “constructive”, in the sense of avoiding the Axiom of Choice by absoluteness arguments. Basically by Shoenfield’s absoluteness theorem, but I went through the argument by hand because I was not aware of that theorem until I went to Wikipedia to find something to link for absoluteness.

Quinn Jun 11, 2013, 8:24 PM
5 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
The computability problem is due to the unbounded ability of P to reason about theorems in the base theory (so that would be a necessary point of relaxation). A computable total function can’t even assign values > ¹⁄₂ to all the theorems of PA and values < ¹⁄₂ to all the sentences refuted by PA.

Quinn Jun 11, 2013, 7:22 PM
1 point
in reply to: DavidS’s comment on: Reflection in Probabilistic Logic
The set A is convex because the convex combination (t times one plus (1-t) times the other) of two coherent probability distributions remains a coherent probability distribution. This in turn is because the convex combination of two probability measures over a space of models (cf. definition 1) remains a probability distribution over the space of models.

I think, but am not sure, that your issue is looking at arbitrary points of [0,1]^{L’}, rather than the ones which correspond to probability measures.

Quinn Jun 8, 2013, 4:06 AM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI (OPFAI #2)

Not only is PA not finitely axiomatizable, but any consistent extension of PA isn’t (I think this is true, the same proof that works for PA should go through here, but I haven’t checked the details)

Well if we had this, we would know immediately that Q + Con(PA) is not an extension of PA (which is what we originally wanted), because it certainly is finitely axiomatizable. I know there are several proofs that PA is not finitely axiomatizable, but I have not read any of them, so can’t comment on the strengthened statement, though it sounds true.

Quinn Jun 8, 2013, 1:55 AM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI (OPFAI #2)
Ah, so my question was more along the line: does finite axiomatizability of a stronger (consistent) theory imply finite axiomatizability of the weaker theory? (This would of course imply Q + Con(PA) is not stronger than PA, Q being the usual symbol for Robinson arithmetic.)

On the model theoretic side, I think I can make something work, but it depends on distorting the specific definition of Con(PA) in a way that I’m not really happy about. In any case, I agree that your example is trivial to state and trivial to believe correct, but maybe it’s less trivial to prove correct.

Here’s what I was thinking:

Consider the predicate P(x) which says “if x != Sx, then x does not encode a PA-proof of 0=1”, and let ConMinus(PA) say for all x, P(x). Now, I think one could argue that ConMinus is a fair definition of (or substitute for?) Con, in that qualifying a formula with “if x != Sx” does not change its meaning in the standard model. Alternately, you could push this “if x != Sx” clause deeper, into basically every formula you would use to define the primitive recursive functions needed to talk about consistency in the first place, and you would not change the meanings of these formulas in the standard model. (I guess what I’m saying is that “the” formula asserting the consistency of PA is poorly specified.)

Also, PA is smart enough to prove that numbers are not their own successors, so PA believes in the equivalence of Con and ConMinus. In particular, PA does not prove ConMinus(PA), so PA is not stronger than Q + ConMinus(PA).

On the other hand, let M be the non-negative integers, together with one additional point omega. Put S(omega) = omega, put omega + anything = omega = anything + omega, and similarly for multiplication (except 0 * omega = omega * 0 = 0). I am pretty sure this is a model of Q.

Q is smart enough about its standard integers that it knows none of them encode PA-proofs of 0=1 (the “proves” predicate being Delta_0). Thus the model M satisfies Q + ConMinus(PA). But now we can see that Q + ConMinus(PA) is not stronger than PA, because PA proves “for all x, x is not equal to Sx”, yet this statement fails in a model of Q + ConMinus(PA).

EDIT: escape characters for *.

Quinn Jun 7, 2013, 3:32 AM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI (OPFAI #2)
Your post confused me for a moment, because Robinson + Con(PA) is of course not weaker than PA. It proves Con(PA), and PA doesn’t.

I see now that your point is that Robinson arithmetic is sufficiently weak compared to PA that PA should not be weaker than Robinson + Con(PA). Is there an obvious proof of this?

(For example, if Robinson + Con(PA) proved all theorems of PA, would this contradict the fact that PA is not finitely axiomatizable?)

Quinn Feb 9, 2013, 9:03 AM
10 points
on: What are you working on? February 2013
Since December, I’ve been persuing a “remedial computer science education”, for the sake of both well-roundedness and employability. My background is in the purest of pure math (Ph. Dropout from a well-ranked program), so I feel I can move fairly quickly here, though the territory is new.

My biggest milestone to date has been solving the first 100 Project Euler problems in Python (no omissions!). I had had a bit of Python experience before, and I picked 100 as the smallest number that sounded impressive (to me).

Second biggest milestone: following a course outline, I wrote an interpreter for a very limited subset of Scheme/Racket. This really helped de-mystify programming languages for me. (Although rather than learn OCaML like the course wanted, I just hacked it together in Python so that I could move on to a new project sooner.)

In the same vein, I’m currently reading and working through SICP, still using Racket. I’m in Chapter 3 of 5, though I’m often peeking ahead to Chapter 4 because it looks pretty exciting.

Of course, I won’t be a true LISP wizard without understanding macros, so the next (or concurrent) project is to go through the relevant Racket Docs tutorial.

I have some other likely future projects in mind, though I’m actually trying not to plan too far ahead lest it all appear more daunting.
- Forcing myself through some C, to build character. This was explicitly recommended by a software engineer friend as a more “useful” way to spend my time than learning to LISP.
- An algorithms course, possibly using this book

Quinn Jul 3, 2012, 6:23 AM
2 points
on: Learn Power Searching with Google
Registered.

Quinn Jun 14, 2012, 9:48 PM
29 points
in reply to: 2196B4F8’s comment on: How confident is your atheism?
From Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (p 325):

The probability of a rare event is most likely to be overestimated when the alternative is not fully specified… [Researcher Craig Fox] asked [participants] to estimate the probability that each of the eight participating teams would win the playoff; the victory of each team in turn was the focal event.

… The result: the probability judgments generated sucessively for the eight teams added up to 240%!

Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism? If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.

Quinn

Notes/​blog posts on two re­cent MIRI papers

Notes/blog posts on two recent MIRI papers