Understanding Artificial Intelligence Through Algorithmic Information Theory

Understanding Artificial Intelligence Through Algorithmic Information Theory

• Artificial Intelligence is more than just a collection of brilliant, innovative methods to solve problems.
• If you are interested in machine learning or are planning to explore it, the course will make you see artificial learning in an entirely new way. You will know how to formulate optimal hypotheses for a learning task. And you will be able to analyze learning techniques such as clustering or neural networks as just ways of compressing information.
• If you are interested in reasoning , you will understand that reasoning by analogy, reasoning by induction, explaining, proving, etc. are all alike; they all amount to providing more compact descriptions of situations.
• If you are interested in mathematics , you will be amazed at the fact that crucial notions such as probability and randomness can be redefined in terms of algorithmic information. You will also understand that there are theoretical limits to what artificial intelligence can do.
• If you are interested in human intelligence , you will find some intriguing results in this course. Thanks to algorithmic information, notions such as unexpectedness, interest and, to a certain extent, aesthetics, can be formally defined and computed, and this may change your views on what artificial intelligence can achieve in the future.

Half a century ago, three mathematicians made the same discovery independently. They understood that the concept of information belonged to computer science; that computer science could say what information means. Algorithmic Information Theory was born.