MIRIxUW workshop, March 21

[Sam Eisenstat]

Hi everyone,

The next MIRIxUW workshop will be this Saturday, March 21. We will meet at 12 at the William's in the UW Plaza for lunch. Around 12:30-1 we will head over to campus for the workshop. It will be in MC 1085 if that room is available, with MC 2065 or 2066 as the backup, and wandering around looking for a room as a further backup.

We will be reading a bunch of posts from MIRI's Intelligent Agents Forum about some recent ideas relating to UDT. Unfortunately, the forum seems to be down right now (do you know anything about that James?). If I can't get the posts by Thursday, I'll post revised plans.

Best,

Sam

[Sam Eisenstat]

I looked over a bunch of posts and I chose one, two, three, four, five. These posts address the question of what UDT accomplishes, and why we might want to regard its decisions as rational. I'm interested in them as a starting point for the more general question of when decisions are rational. How can the criteria with respect to which UDT is shown to be optimal be generalized to give criteria for rationality in more situations? What agents would satisfy those generalized criteria?

I haven't had time to think about this, but these posts might assume a lot of provability logic. Some of this background may be covered in An Introduction to L öb's Theorem in MIRI Research (LaVictoire) or Provability logic—a short introduction (Lindström). I will also bring Boolos' The Logic of Provability to the workshop.

I also want to mention this post by Benja that I found while looking for the UDT posts, in order to disagree with it. EDT seems to simple to be right, given that I know of no argument that it is right, but I know of no proof that it is not equivalent to UDT (I think Gaifman's arguments run into the same problems as others I have seen, but I read that paper before I had identified the problem, and I recall the paper being good). Rather, it seems that UDT just isn't formalized sufficiently to make the comparison, that is, the only problems for which UDT has been formalized are ones where EDT gives the same answer, or ones where EDT fails to give any answer because it would need to condition on probability zero events. Further, I am suspicious of the claim that the agents in the problems that run into probability zero events are really EDT agents. Anyway, this is all rather vague, since the issue is subtle and I don't have much time. If you want to practice philosophy, you can read the post by Benja and see if you can reconstruct my argument (you might want to think about simpler versions of this first, like the smoking lesion problem).

[Sandy Maguire]

Not sure I can make it, but I'll give it a shot. Looking forward to it regardless!

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[Ashley Kleinhans]

Hi,

Is there anything happening 20 - 31 July? Its when I am visiting Waterloo. 

-Ashley 

[Jess Riedel]

I don't think anything's planned, but I'll be around.  I'm sure we could get folks together for a coffee.

[Ashley Kleinhans]

Sounds good to me :) I would like to understand a little more about what this whole exercise is about. An meet some peeps of course. 

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