HOW MUCH DO WE HAVE TO PAY TO EAT? David Wolpert http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/people/dhw/ Overview: At least since Hume, people have wondered whether there are first principles limitations on what humans can deduce / infer about reality. Godel was perhaps the first to produce a formal mathematical result on this theme, concentrating on the topic of what can be deduced. More recent work has returned to the topic that originally interested Hume, inductive inference. That work establishes that the expected generalization accuracy of any given inference algorithm is given by an inner product between two quantities. The first of those quantities is (a particular representation of) the inference algorithm. The second quantity is the distribution of inference problems likely to be encountered in reality. One ramification of this inner product formula is the ``No Free Lunch'' (NFL) theorems. These state that any two inference algorithms are equivalent, when their performance is averaged across all possible inference problems. On the other hand, in addition to the NFL theorems, there are other ``Free Lunch'' theorems, establishing assumption-free superiorities of some inference algorithms over others. So the mathematics tells us that while in some senses Hume was correct, he didn't see the full picture. More recently still it has been realized that black-box optimization is formally analogous to inductive inference. In particular, it is now known that an inner product between one's optimization algorithm and the distribution of optimization problems likely to be encountered determines expected optimization performance. This again results in NFL theorems. Here those theorems state that any two optimization algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible optimization problems. Some have argued that when translated into biology this result has implications for intelligent design. The most recent work on this topic has considered a framework covering many optimization scenarios in addition to black-box optimization. In particular this framework also covers multi-armed bandit problems, and the evolution of multiple co-evolving players. As a particular instance of the latter type of optimization problem, the framework covers ``self-play'' problems. In these problems one has a set of multiple players. The set of players work together, to produce a champion. That champion then engages one or more antagonists in a subsequent multi-player game. The optimization problem is how the players should work together to produce a best possible champion. In contrast to the traditional optimization case where the NFL results hold, in self-play there are free lunches: in coevolution some algorithms produce better champions than other algorithms, averaged across all possible problems. However in the typical coevolutionary scenarios encountered in biology, there is no champion. There the NFL theorems still hold.