3,843 research outputs found
On proof and progress in mathematics
In response to Jaffe and Quinn [math.HO/9307227], the author discusses forms
of progress in mathematics that are not captured by formal proofs of theorems,
especially in his own work in the theory of foliations and geometrization of
3-manifolds and dynamical systems.Comment: 17 pages. Abstract added in migration
Workshop on Verification and Theorem Proving for Continuous Systems (NetCA Workshop 2005)
Oxford, UK, 26 August 200
POWERPLAY: Training an Increasingly General Problem Solver by Continually Searching for the Simplest Still Unsolvable Problem
Most of computer science focuses on automatically solving given computational
problems. I focus on automatically inventing or discovering problems in a way
inspired by the playful behavior of animals and humans, to train a more and
more general problem solver from scratch in an unsupervised fashion. Consider
the infinite set of all computable descriptions of tasks with possibly
computable solutions. The novel algorithmic framework POWERPLAY (2011)
continually searches the space of possible pairs of new tasks and modifications
of the current problem solver, until it finds a more powerful problem solver
that provably solves all previously learned tasks plus the new one, while the
unmodified predecessor does not. Wow-effects are achieved by continually making
previously learned skills more efficient such that they require less time and
space. New skills may (partially) re-use previously learned skills. POWERPLAY's
search orders candidate pairs of tasks and solver modifications by their
conditional computational (time & space) complexity, given the stored
experience so far. The new task and its corresponding task-solving skill are
those first found and validated. The computational costs of validating new
tasks need not grow with task repertoire size. POWERPLAY's ongoing search for
novelty keeps breaking the generalization abilities of its present solver. This
is related to Goedel's sequence of increasingly powerful formal theories based
on adding formerly unprovable statements to the axioms without affecting
previously provable theorems. The continually increasing repertoire of problem
solving procedures can be exploited by a parallel search for solutions to
additional externally posed tasks. POWERPLAY may be viewed as a greedy but
practical implementation of basic principles of creativity. A first
experimental analysis can be found in separate papers [53,54].Comment: 21 pages, additional connections to previous work, references to
first experiments with POWERPLA
The proof-theoretic strength of Ramsey's theorem for pairs and two colors
Ramsey's theorem for -tuples and -colors () asserts
that every k-coloring of admits an infinite monochromatic
subset. We study the proof-theoretic strength of Ramsey's theorem for pairs and
two colors, namely, the set of its consequences, and show that
is conservative over . This
strengthens the proof of Chong, Slaman and Yang that does not
imply , and shows that is
finitistically reducible, in the sense of Simpson's partial realization of
Hilbert's Program. Moreover, we develop general tools to simplify the proofs of
-conservation theorems.Comment: 32 page
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