LESSWRONG 88 ( 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