
Toward an AI Physicist for Unsupervised Learning - rcshubhadeep
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.10525
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TezlaOil
The computer program BACON (1987) of Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon was
given the distances of planets from the sun together with their period of
revolution and it independently rediscovered Kepler's third law, illustrating
how far the positivism at work in "AI" can go. But Kepler's achievement was
not determining a - straightforward - relation between two rows of numbers: it
was to figure out which numbers should be related, and Kepler's real
achievement was actually finding the right question. Incidentally, Kepler
stated a fourth law relating planets to perfect polyhedra, and one wonders why
this fourth law has not been rediscovered by computer yet...

\-- Jean-Yves Girard: Locus Solum

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jackpark
Bacon was the dissertation project of Pat Langley under Herbert Simon. It was
one of several dissertations exploring rational reconstruction of previous
discoveries.
[https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/81-1/Papers/025.pdf](https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/81-1/Papers/025.pdf)

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bravura
So I'm still trying to grok this, but this could be a very important result if
it could be generalized to the problem of meta-learning and model selection.

In that setting, the model selection oracle could access a shared knowledge
pool of learned theorems that are biases about what kinds of models are
better. e.g. convolutional nets are better than fully connected nets for
vision tasks.

This could break us out of the diminishing returns we have seen with deep
learning, by allowing us to better explore the space of compact model
architectures, and develop shared biases about what is better. For example,
learning the programmatic generation of Inception-like networks.

Bonus points if you want to add a blockchain connection, to decentralize the
accumulation of the shared theorem base: Proof of work is figuring out what
biases are true over some benchmark, which can be stored to a distributed
ledger. Competing annotations lead malicious and noisy results to be
penalized.

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godelmachine
I got introduced to Max Tegmark's work last year. Got his book - Life 3.0 and
Our Mathematical Universe

