Solomonoff’s inductive inference: the universal machine learning algorithm, the best of all?

Is there a universal machine learning algorithm — the best of all algorithms in the world?

It turns out there is! It’s called Solomonoff’s inductive inference, named after Ray Solomonoff, who developed the theory back in the 1960s.

What this algorithm is, in what sense it is “the best,” and why you’ve never heard of it — I’ll discuss all of this in detail on October 7 at a meeting of the Markov Laboratory seminar.

The talk will feature plenty of beautiful mathematics! To enjoy it, you don’t even need to know any standard ML. It will be easiest for 2nd–3rd year undergraduate mathematics students. The areas of mathematics involved: probability theory, measure theory, and theoretical computer science.