---
title: Some Questions
date: 2012-01-11
tags:
- solomonoff induction
techne: :done
episteme: :speculation
slug: 2012/01/11/si-some-questions/
---

Let's kick off the thinking process about Solomonoff Induction (SI), Kolmogorov complexity (KC), AIXI and so on. Here's some questions I wanna answer.

1. How do you calculate the KC of a program?
2. Why are KC and SI incomputable? How bad is this limitation?
3. Are there alternatives to KC? Are there different variants?
4. How do you actually predict something with SI?
5. How does SI work with non-sequential data? (i.e., normally SI completes a sequence of bits, but we also wanna use it for tasks like "Is this sentence part of this language?")
6. How does AIXI work?
7. What are computable approximations of KC, SI and AIXI?
8. Are there existing practical uses for SI? If there are alternative approaches for a use case, how well does SI fare? (Is it as awesome as Bayes?)
9. What's the relationship to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (GIT)?
10. Can a human use some form of SI? If not, why not? If so, examples? (Compare with Bayes, which is a bit tricky too use for humans with larger data sets, but is still usable, as Carrier's resurrection arguments show.)
11. Do SI and AIXI mostly rely on brute computation or memory or both? (Or is it unknown?)
12. SI is a complexity-only prior for Occam's Razor. Are there speed priors? Do they have some obvious disadvantages? (Has SI?)
13. KC can be used to test a string for its randomness. How does that work?
14. Using KC, is there a difference between real randomness and pseudo-randomness?
15. What's some recent stuff that's happening? Is the research making progress? Does anyone care about SI besides some math heads?
16. Are there some obvious philosophical implications of SI?
17. (What's up with [Ray Solomonoff's beard][Solomonoff beard]? I mean, seriously.) 

This is gonna be an interesting week. As I said, this is my thinking process - I can't answer many of these questions myself yet! Once I have written this stuff and have a clear picture, I'll clean it up and turn it into an article (or short sequence, if it's too long). Then feedback, improvements, karma. Or I end up hating math forever. It's an adventure! (I'm getting my wisdom teeth removed tomorrow, so if this feels particularly incoherent, I blame the meds.)
