Audio note: this article contains 125 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

This post depends on a basic understanding of history-based reinforcement learning and the AIXI model.

I am grateful to Marcus Hutter and the lesswrong team for early feedback, though any remaining errors are mine.

The universal agent AIXI treats the environment it interacts with like a video game it is playing; the actions it chooses at each step are like hitting buttons and the percepts it receives are like images on the screen (observations) and an unambiguous point tally (rewards). It has been suggested that since AIXI is inherently dualistic and doesn't believe anything in the environment can "directly" hurt it, if it were embedded in the real world it would eventually drop an anvil on its [...]

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Outline:

(10:28) Formal Equivalence with an Uncorrupted AIXI

(15:16) Closing Thoughts

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.