Properties of Algorithmic Information Distance
Abstract
The domain-independent universal Normalized Information Distance based on Kolmogorov complexity has been (in approximate form) successfully applied to a variety of difficult clustering problems. In this paper we investigate theoretical properties of the un-normalized algorithmic information distance . The main question we are asking in this work is what properties this curious distance has, besides being a metric. We show that many (in)finite-dimensional spaces can(not) be isometrically scale-embedded into the space of finite strings with metric . We also show that is not an Euclidean distance, but any finite set of points in Euclidean space can be scale-embedded into . A major contribution is the development of the necessary framework and tools for finding more (interesting) properties of in future, and to state several open problems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.21988,
title = {Properties of Algorithmic Information Distance},
author = {Marcus Hutter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21988},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
33 pages