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Properties of Algorithmic Information Distance

Information Theory 2025-07-30 v1 math.IT Metric Geometry

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 dKd_K. 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 dKd_K. We also show that dKd_K is not an Euclidean distance, but any finite set of points in Euclidean space can be scale-embedded into ({0,1},dK)(\{0,1\}^*,d_K). A major contribution is the development of the necessary framework and tools for finding more (interesting) properties of dKd_K in future, and to state several open problems.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:24:24.235Z