Intercepting free falling objects: Better use Occam’s razor than internalize Newton’s law

Title: Intercepting Free Falling Objects: Better Use Occam's Razor than Internalize Newton's Law

Internal models and prediction of visual gravitational motion

Baurès et al. [Baurès, R., Benguigui, N., Amorim, M.-A., & Siegler, I. A. (2007). Intercepting free falling objects: Better use Occam's razor than internalize Newton's law. Vision Research, 47, 2982-2991] rejected the hypothesis that free-falling objects are intercepted using a predictive model of gravity. They argued instead for "a continuous guide for action timing" based on visual informatio...

A Syntactic Approach to Prediction

A central question in the empirical sciences is; given a body of data how do we best attempt to make predictions? There are subtle differences between current approaches which include Minimum Message Length (MML) and Solomonoff’s theory of induction [24]. The nature of hypothesis spaces is explored and we observe a correlation between the complexity of a function and the frequency with which it...

Sharpening Occam's Razor

We provide a new representation-independent formulation of Occam’s razor theorem, based on Kolmogorov complexity. This new formulation allows us to: (i) Obtain better sample complexity than both length-based [4] and VC-based [3] versions of Occam’s razor theorem, in many applications; and (ii) Achieve a sharper reverse of Occam’s razor theorem than that of [5]. Specifically, we weaken the assum...

Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism

Underdetermination arguments for skepticism maintain that our common sense view of the external world is no better, evidentially speaking, than some skeptical competitors. An important and well-known response by dogmatists, those who believe our commonsense view is justified, appeals to abduction or inference to the best explanation. The predominant version of this strategy, going back at least...