>We don't know if Turing-equivalent formalisms are the Ultimate Representation of Everything, but they seem to be by far the best Representation of Everything a

>We don't know if Turing-equivalent formalisms are the Ultimate Representation of Everything, but they seem to be by far the best Representation of Everything anyone has found so far. Well, sure... and Wolfram's 2-state-3-symbol means that an incredibly tiny machine with no memory at all is basically equivalent to any computer we've ever designed. However, that doesn't provide us any insight into how thinking works, or how to write programs, or anything really. It's a mathematical curiosity. In reality, Turing machines themselves are a terrible representation of algorithms, since despite being able to represent anything, anyone who tries to think of writing code in terms of developing simple rules for writing numbers on a strip is going to lose their mind. Aside from the obvious problem (AIXI is undecidable), there's no real reason to believe that it represents a useful way to analyze the problem of intelligence. For one thing, no progress has really been made on the Hutter prize since its inception -- prediction by partial matching continues to win, and it was developed in the '80s.