© 1999 by British Computer Society
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Discussion of the Papers by Rissanen, and by Wallace and Dowe
A1 Department of Statistics, UBC, 6356 Agricultural Road, Room 333, Vancouver, BC, Canada, U6T 1Z2 Email: bertrand@stat.ubc.ca
Commenting on the papers by Dr Rissanen and Professors Wallace and Dowe is a daunting sort of pleasure. Superficially, the papers are not closely related: Dr Rissanen has focused on the Shtarkov optimality criterion in a minimum description length (MDL) context giving some new implications from normalization (see his equation (1)) for model selection and hypothesis testing. By contrast, Wallace and Dowe have given a first, and welcome, effort to axiomatize a setting in which it is reasonable to hope that the algorithmic complexity approaches of Kolmogorov and Solomonoffstreams one and two, using UTMsmay coincide with the Shannon theory approachesstream three in its minimum message length (MML) and MDL versions. Despite these differences, there are several senses in which these two papers are closely related.