Anyone familiar with Paul Pfeiffer’s pioneering moving-image work knows that he has been out ahead of “the culture” for more than twenty years. Yet the manipulations and labors he thought to exert on at-one-time recalcitrant film and video frames have now been incorporated into platform and persuasion technologies that have touched us all, whether we’re aware of it or not.
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Originally posted in December 2015: A dialogue between Ashley, a computer scientist who s never heard of
i. Unbounded analysis
BLAINE: Good evening, Msr. Ashley.
ASHLEY: I ve heard there s this thing called Solomonoff s theory of inductive inference .
BLAINE: The rumors have spread, then.
ASHLEY: Yeah, so, what the heck is that about?
BLAINE: Invented in the 1960s by the mathematician Ray Solomonoff, the key idea in Solomonoff induction is to do sequence prediction by using Bayesian updating on a prior composed of a mixture of all computable probability distributions
ASHLEY: Wait. Back up a lot. Before you try to explain what Solomonoff induction