[ExI] bar sinister gets more than you, was:... gets more than you do

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-11-22 04:44, spike wrote:
>
> It occurred to me that without some kind of indication of a range of 
> possible amounts in the vault, this is any ordinary trivial guessing 
> game.  But if we assume the amount of money in the vault is somewhere 
> between 0 and 6,283,185 dollars with each amount being equally 
> probable, the problem becomes a calculation.
>

I actually liked the undefined nature of the amount. Thinking about 
things that could have any order of magnitude brings up really cool 
issues of noninformative priors.

The thing reminds me of the problem of doing a Bayesian analysis of the 
German tank problem when you have only one tank (it came up during I 
lecture I gave last week).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Using a noninformative prior there will not work for one tank. If you 
have a known upper limit Omega on how many tanks there could be, then 
you can assume the actual number is uniform between 1 and Omega and do a 
calculation, ending up with an estimate.

In your lovely problem having an upper limit Omega makes things easier 
but less interesting.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151122/61a85dac/attachment.html>