Marcus Hutter

Can mathematics, or is it just playing with symbols?

And, you know, open-ended questions.

And, I mean, it's for high school students, so they have then resources from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and from Star Wars and The Chicken Crossed the Road, yeah.

And it's fun to read, but it's also quite deep.

No, I will tell you from the future.

OK, from the past.

So from the past, I would say when I discovered my Axie model.

I mean, it was not in one day, but it was one moment where I realized Kolmogorov complexity and didn't even know that it existed.

But I discovered sort of this compression idea myself.

But immediately, I knew I can't be the first one.

But I had this idea.

And then I knew about sequential decision tree and I knew if I put it together, this is the right thing.

And yeah, still when I think back about this moment, I'm super excited about it.

So I worked in this company.

So in this sense, the four and a half years was not completely wasted.

And I worked on an image interpolation problem.

And I developed quite neat new interpolation techniques, and they got patented.

And then, which happens quite often, I got sort of overboard and thought about, yeah, that's pretty good, but it's not the best.

So what is the best possible way of doing interpolation?

And then I thought, yeah, you want the simplest picture, which is, if you coarse-grain it, recovers your original picture.