Re:Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent...
by inimino on Saturday October 12, 2019 @05:15PM
(#21236379)
Kolmogorov complexity is just the standard name for a concept that's useful across machine learning, AI, compression, etc. It's not just a definition in some obscure result in complexity theory.
OP was simply saying that, in any general-purpose programming language (where all possible programs are expressible and none are unfairly favored) the solution to problem B will inevitably be longer than problem A. This is quite a bit more precise than just saying "a more complicated problem", and if you have the intuition behind it, there's no reason not to use the term.
Re:Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent...
by YeGoblynQueenne on Monday October 14, 2019 @04:24AM
(#21246155)
I'm not convinced but we've taken this far enough I think. Thank you for an insightful conversation.
I don't agree. I don't need formal terms to develop intuition. Formal terms are necessary when speaking formally, and they are only detracting from the point of a discussion otherwise.
And I don't agree with this either:
>> But the OPs argument wasn't that one program would happen to be longer, but rather that it must by necessity be longer, because the problem is fundamentally more complex, which is exactly what the formal concept was created to capture.
The way I understand it the formal concept is useful in proofs of the impossibility to calculate various other quantitites. Its utility is not to argue that this or that program should intuitively have lower Kolmogorov complexity.
To be honest, I'm so confused by the use of the term by the OP that I have no idea what they meant to say with it.