English

Information content in formal languages

Information Theory 2023-11-17 v2 Mathematical Physics Commutative Algebra math.IT math.MP

Abstract

Motivated by creating physical theories, formal languages SS with variables are considered and a kind of distance between elements of the languages is defined by the formula d(x,y)=(xy)(x)(y)d(x,y)= \ell(x \nabla y) - \ell(x) \wedge \ell(y), where \ell is a length function and xyx \nabla y means the united theory of xx and yy. Actually we mainly consider abstract abelian idempotent monoids (S,)(S,\nabla) provided with length functions \ell. The set of length functions can be projected to another set of length functions such that the distance dd is actually a pseudometric and satisfies d(xa,yb)d(x,y)+d(a,b)d(x\nabla a,y\nabla b) \le d(x,y) + d(a,b). We also propose a "signed measure" on the set of Boolean expressions of elements in SS, and a Banach-Mazur-like distance between abelian, idempotent monoids with length functions, or formal languages.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.04849,
  title  = {Information content in formal languages},
  author = {Bernhard Burgstaller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.04849},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Content is completely unchanged, but explanatory text is inserted between lemmas, theorems and proofs for better understandability of the paper

R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:05:01.914Z