Live data from Hacker News

AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 83 posts

AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity

#1
Hi folks. This is the third part in an ongoing theory I’ve been developing over the last few years called the Infinite Choice Barrier (ICB). The core idea is simple:

General intelligence—especially AGI—is structurally impossible under certain epistemic conditions.

Not morally, not practically. Mathematically.

The argument splits across three barriers: 1.Computability (Gödel, Turing, Rice): You can’t decide what your system can’t see. 2.Entropy (Shannon): Beyond a certain point, signal breaks down structurally. 3.Complexity (Kolmogorov, Chaitin): Most real-world problems are fundamentally incompressible.

This paper focuses on (3): Kolmogorov Complexity. It argues that most of what humans care about is not just hard to model, but formally unmodellable—because the shortest description of a problem is the problem.

In other words: you can’t generalize from what can’t be compressed.

Here’s the abstract:

There is a common misconception that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will emerge through scale, memory, or recursive optimization. This paper argues the opposite: that as systems scale, they approach the structural limit of generalization itself. Using Kolmogorov complexity, we show that many real-world problems—particularly those involving social meaning, context divergence, and semantic volatility—are formally incompressible and thus unlearnable by any finite algorithm.

This is not a performance issue. It’s a mathematical wall. And it doesn’t care how many tokens you’ve got

The paper isn’t light, but it’s precise. If you’re into limits, structures, and why most intelligence happens outside of optimization, it might be worth your time.

https://philpapers.org/archive/SCHAII-18.pdf

Happy to read your view.

Re: AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity

#4

How is your brain doing it then?

It follows that it doesn’t.

In practical terms, the result doesn’t matter. The race to approximate the human thought process and call it AGI (which is what matters economically) is on. If you can approximate it meaningfully faster that the real brain works in meatspace, you are winning. What it will mean for humanity or civilization is an open question.

Re: AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity

#7
I think that any paper that argues something is impossible is fundamentally flawed, particularly when there are examples of it being possible.

Also, what's the point of telling others you believe what they are doing is impossible, specially after the results we are seeing even at the free-tier, open-to-the-public services?

Re: AGI Is Mathematically Impossible (3): Kolmogorov Complexity

#10
post #4

How is your brain doing it then?

It follows that it doesn’t. In practical terms, the result doesn’t matter. The race to approximate the human thought process and call it AGI (which is what matters economically) is on. If you can approximate it meaningfully faster that the real brain works in meatspace, you are winning. What it will mean for humanity or civilization is an open question.

I don't think it even needs to be faster, if you can make an artificial brain that's useful even if it's 100x slower, you can always run stuff in parallel.
Post reply on HN