Randomness, Information, and Complexity
Abstract
We review possible measures of complexity which might in particular be applicable to situations where the complexity seems to arise spontaneously. We point out that not all of them correspond to the intuitive (or "naive") notion, and that one should not expect a unique observable of complexity. One of the main problems is to distinguish complex from disordered systems. This and the fact that complexity is closely related to information requires that we also give a review of information measures. We finally concentrate on quantities which measure in some way or other the difficulty of classifying and forecasting sequences of discrete symbols, and study them in simple examples.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1208.3459,
title = {Randomness, Information, and Complexity},
author = {Peter Grassberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.3459},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
Reprinted version of a paper that appeared first in Proc. 5th Mexican School on Statistical Physics, Oaxtepec 1989, with errors corrected and footnotes added. When citing, please cite the original publication and the present arXiv version