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Originally posted in December 2015: A dialogue between Ashley, a computer scientist who's never heard of
i. Unbounded analysis
BLAINE: Good evening, Msr. Ashley.
ASHLEY: I've heard there's this thing called "Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference".
BLAINE: The rumors have spread, then.
ASHLEY: Yeah, so, what the heck is that about?
BLAINE: Invented in the 1960s by the mathematician Ray Solomonoff, the key idea in Solomonoff induction is to do sequence prediction by using Bayesian updating on a prior composed of a mixture of all computable probability distributions—
ASHLEY: Wait. Back up a lot. Before you try to explain what Solomonoff induction