When and where was Ray Solomonoff born?
Ray Solomonoff was born on the 25th of July 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up as the son of Jewish Russian immigrants named Phillip Julius and Sarah Mashman Solomonoff.
Ray Solomonoff was born on the 25th of July 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up as the son of Jewish Russian immigrants named Phillip Julius and Sarah Mashman Solomonoff.
Ray Solomonoff stood among the original ten invitees to the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence organized by Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy in 1956. He remained at the conference for the entire summer alongside McCarthy and Minsky while no other attendees stayed for the full duration of the event.
Ray Solomonoff first described algorithmic probability in 1960 and published a theorem stating that if a description contains N digits then the probability equals two to the negative N power. This method combined Occam's razor with the Principle of Multiple Explanations and assigned probabilities based on the length of the shortest binary description.
Algorithmic Probability is complete yet incomputable as a necessary consequence of its design because some algorithms take too long to run even though they are recognized as possible solutions. Any computable system remains incomplete by comparison but will discover any describable regularity in data requiring only a small sample size.
In 1970 Ray Solomonoff formed his own one man company named Oxbridge Research where he continued his research until the early 2000s without interruption. He worked there except for periods spent at other institutions like MIT or the University of Saarland and also briefly at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Lugano, Switzerland.