English

Depth as Randomness Deficiency

Computational Complexity 2008-09-16 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

Depth of an object concerns a tradeoff between computation time and excess of program length over the shortest program length required to obtain the object. It gives an unconditional lower bound on the computation time from a given program in absence of auxiliary information. Variants known as logical depth and computational depth are expressed in Kolmogorov complexity theory. We derive quantitative relation between logical depth and computational depth and unify the different depth notions by relating them to A. Kolmogorov and L. Levin's fruitful notion of randomness deficiency. Subsequently, we revisit the computational depth of infinite strings, introducing the notion of super deep sequences and relate it with other approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0809.2546,
  title  = {Depth as Randomness Deficiency},
  author = {Luis Antunes and Armando Matos and Andre Souto and Paul Vitanyi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.2546},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Lates, 15 pages, no figures. Theory of Computing Systems, To appear

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:20:22.488Z