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This idea is very similar to Solomnoff induction, which is fine, but... what stops a more “powerful” entity designing a simulation from “counting backwards from
by ssivark 6y ago
This idea is very similar to Solomnoff induction, which is fine, but... what stops a more “powerful” entity designing a simulation from “counting backwards from infinity”? The crux of your argument seems to be that we can’t (currently) think of any other way to do it.
- at_a_remove 6y agoI think my argument focuses more on pragmatism. As an example, I had a database I had to investigate with just ... nasty data. Really filthy. Multiple things compounded into a single field, and so on and so forth. One field in particular I needed to decode for the process. So I tried a regular expression and it mostly worked on the first ten. But then it failed. And I looked at the case that failed and scanned for other incidents, and now I had two expressions to try. And I looked at hundred instances, and it mostly worked, but there were some exceptions. This went on until I had ten sets of "rules" to cover all four million of that field. It's not elegant, it probably isn't the fastest, but it starts at the bottom and works its way forward.
- alexvoda 6y agoBy counting backwards from infinity you stay at infinity.