Alignment Workspace

udt-tiling-foundations

or · drafted

Statement

The tiling results for expected-utility agents using versions of UDT account for time and causality, so that an agent modifies only the parts of its policy causally downstream of the present, by at least one of: the causal-order formalization of the paper's theorems; a communication-based tiling theorem with a non-degenerate witness; a direct treatment of UDT 1.0's self-coordination.

Source

projects/deference/faf-cleanroom-2026-10-02/sources/references/bli/chats/bli-chat-2024-12-09-udt-tiling-research-agenda.md, turn 1 (the maintainer): "First, there are some basic things to fix or improve about the UDT tiling results so far. I haven't accounted for time and causality to my satisfaction. That is: an agent cannot meaningfully modify its policy about the past, or about other branches of possibility that are not causally downstream of the present. Only some forms of self-modification are even possible. I haven't properly accounted for that." and "There are also other things that can be improved about these basic results, probably."

projects/deference/faf-cleanroom-2026-10-02/sources/references/bli/understanding-trust/overleaf-final-source/main.tex, section Tiling & Trust, footnote: "our formalism will avoid an explicit treatment of time or causality."

Notes

The fifth mid-level goal, the maintainer's 2024 phase 1. The paper is his with two co-authors. Live work: the clean-room's udt-paper-tiling and udt-comm-trust packages and his 2025-06-30 working notes (public copy under the clean-room sources). The task leaf tiling-brain-dump-synthesis, under the self-coordination route, synthesizes those notes into next steps. The 'modified fairness assumptions' heading in the same chat is the AI's, not his, and is a route of the improvement claim only.

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Author @smithy-verity; version 1; size L.

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