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Are the No Free Lunch Theorem and Halting Problem connected?

Cross Validated Asked by user70990 on February 1, 2021

I just read about the no free lunch theorem where it is said:

Uniformly averaged over all target functions $F$, $mathcal{E}_1 (E|F,
> n) — mathcal{E}_2(E|F, n) = 0$

The words “all target functions”, reminded me of the halting problem:

In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of
determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and
an input, whether the program will finish running or continue to run
forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

This made me wonder if the two are related, if yes, how ?

EDIT:

Here is a different reason why they might be connected:

-Intelligence is a form of (lossy) compression

-Measure of compressability is Kolmogorov complexity

-Calculating the Kolmogorov complexity for an arbitrary string is undecidible (-> Halting problem)

(One flaw with this similarity that the Kolmogorow complexity is defined for lossless compression, while Intelligence is a form of lossy compression).

One Answer

No they are not related. In NFL, a function can be considered as a look-up-table (that is, a list of input-output pairs.) We are not concerned with how a function is implemented with NFL. With computability theory, we are concerned with how a function is actually computed.

try Woodward J. Computable and Incomputable Search Algorithms and Functions. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (IEEE ICIS 2009) November 20-22,2009 Shanghai, China. pdf.

Answered by john.r.woodward on February 1, 2021

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