Death and suicide in universal artificial intelligence

Date

2016-06-25

Authors

Martin, Jarryd
Everitt, Tom
Hutter, Marcus

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer Verlag (Germany)

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general paradigm for studying intelligent behaviour, with applications ranging from artificial intelligence to psychology and economics. AIXI is a universal solution to the RL problem; it can learn any computable environment. A technical subtlety of AIXI is that it is defined using a mixture over semimeasures that need not sum to 1, rather than over proper probability measures. In this work we argue that the shortfall of a semimeasure can naturally be interpreted as the agent’s estimate of the probability of its death. We formally define death for generally intelligent agents like AIXI, and prove a number of related theorems about their behaviour. Notable discoveries include that agent behaviour can change radically under positive linear transformations of the reward signal (from suicidal to dogmatically self-preserving), and that the agent’s posterior belief that it will survive increases over time.

Description

Keywords

reinforcement learning (RL), semimeasure, intelligent, behaviour, artificial, intelligence, AIXI, death, probability

Citation

Source

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Type

Journal article

Book Title

Entity type

Access Statement

Open Access

License Rights

Restricted until