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Short Algorithm Detectable?

Simple PRG subroutines of the universe may not necessarily be easy to find. For instance, the second billion bits of $\pi$'s dyadic expansion ``look'' highly random although they are not, because they are computable by a very short algorithm. Another problem with existing data may be its potential incompleteness. To exemplify this: it is easy to see the pattern in an observed sequence $1, 2, 3, \ldots, 100$. But if many values are missing, resulting in an observed subsequence of, say, 7, 19, 54, 57, the pattern will be less obvious.

A systematic enumeration and execution of all candidate algorithms in the time-optimal style of Levin search [#!Levin:73!#] should find one consistent with the data essentially as quickly as possible. Still, currently we do not have an a priori upper bound on the search time. This points to a problem of falsifiability.

Another caveat is that the algorithm computing our universe may somehow be wired up to defend itself against the discovery of its simple PRG. According to Heisenberg we cannot observe the precise, current state of a single electron, let alone our universe, because our actions seem to influence our measurements in a fundamentally unpredictable way. This does not rule out a predictable underlying computational process whose deterministic results we just cannot access [#!Schmidhuber:97brauer!#] -- compare hidden variable theory [#!Bell:66!#,#!Bohm:93!#,#!Hooft:99!#]. More research, however, is necessary to determine to what extent such fundamental undetectability is possible in principle from a computational perspective (compare [#!Svozil:94!#,#!Roessler:98!#]).

For now there is no reason why believers in S should let themselves get discouraged too quickly from searching for simple algorithmic regularity in apparently noisy physical events such as beta decay and ``many world splits'' in the spirit of Everett [#!Everett:57!#]. The potential rewards of such a revolutionary discovery would merit significant experimental and analytic efforts.


next up previous contents
Next: Relation to Previous Work Up: Consequences for Physics Previous: Expected Duration of the
Juergen Schmidhuber
2001-01-09


Related links: In the beginning was the code! - Zuse's thesis - Life, the universe, and everything - Generalized Algorithmic Information - Speed Prior - The New AI