A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON A GENERAL THEORY OF INDUCTIVE INFERENCE

Some preliminary work is presented on a very general new theory of inductive inference. The extrapolation of an ordered sequence of symbols is implemented by computing the a priori probabilities of various sequences of symbols. The a priori probability of a sequence is obtained by considering a universal Turing machine whose output is the sequence in question. An approximation to the a priori probability is given by the shortest input to the machine that will give the desired output. A more exact formulation is given, and it is made somewhat plausible that extrapolation probabilities obtained will be largely independent of just which universal Turing machine was used, providing that the sequence to be extrapolated has an adequate amount of information in it. Some examples are worked out to show the application of the method to specific problems. Applications of the method to curve fitting and other continuous problems are discussed to some extent. Some alternative theories of inductive inference are presented whose validities appear to be corollaries of the validity of the first method described.