Logic List Mailing Archive

Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009)

Obituary: Ray Solomonoff, Founding Father of Algorithmic Information 
Theory

Ray J. Solomonoff, founding father of Algorithmic Information Theory, died 
on December 7, 2009, of complications of a stroke caused by an aneurism in 
his head. Ray was the first inventor of Algorithmic Information Theory 
which deals with the shortest effective description length of objects and 
is commonly designated by the term ``Kolmogorov complexity.''

The latter notion was a side product of his approach to induction. His 
crucial results concerning prediction, in 1960 and later, partially 
resolve the old philosophical problem concerning how to obtain a valid 
prior distribution in Bayes's rule by showing that a single ``universal'' 
distribution can be used instead of any computable prior with almost the 
same resulting predictions. This may be viewed as a central problem of 
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Statistical Inference--with 
the caveat that the universal distribution is incomputable. Solomonoff's 
theory has led to feasible induction and prediction procedures.


Ray Solomonoff is survived by his wife, Grace Morton, 72 Winter Street, 
Arlington, MA 02474, and by his nephew, Alex Solomonoff, of Somerville.

An obituary outlining Solomonoff's contributions to science together with 
biographical remarks is at

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/obituary.html