Related papers: Nonuniform Kolmogorov extractors
Consider a binary string $x$ of length $n$ whose Kolmogorov complexity is $\alpha n$ for some $\alpha<1$. We want to increase the complexity of $x$ by changing a small fraction of bits in $x$. This is always possible: Buhrman, Fortnow,…
We construct a universal decompressor $U$ for plain Kolmogorov complexity $\mathrm{C}_U$ such that the Halting Problem cannot be decided by any polynomial-time oracle machine with access to the set of random strings $R_{\mathrm{C}_U} = \{x…
Suppose we are given an infinite sequence of input cells, each initialized with a uniform random symbol from $[n]$. How hard is it to output a sequence in $[n]^n$ that is close to a uniform random permutation? Viola (SICOMP 2020)…
A statistical language model assigns probability to strings of arbitrary length. Unfortunately, it is not possible to gather reliable statistics on strings of arbitrary length from a finite corpus. Therefore, a statistical language model…
The Kolmogorov complexity of x, denoted C(x), is the length of the shortest program that generates x. For such a simple definition, Kolmogorov complexity has a rich and deep theory, as well as applications to a wide variety of topics…
Information distance can be defined not only between two strings but also in a finite multiset of strings of cardinality greater than two. We give an elementary proof for expressing the information distance in terms of plain Kolmogorov…
Drawing on various notions from theoretical computer science, we present a novel numerical approach, motivated by the notion of algorithmic probability, to the problem of approximating the Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity of short strings. The…
We show that for a wide range of channels and code ensembles with pairwise-independent codewords, with probability tending to 1 with the code length, expurgating an arbitrarily small fraction of codewords from a randomly selected code…
Suppose that, for any (k \geq 1), (\epsilon > 0) and sufficiently large $\sigma$, we are given a black box that allows us to sample characters from a $k$th-order Markov source over the alphabet (\{0, ..., \sigma - 1\}). Even if we know the…
Nonuniformity is a central concept in computational complexity with powerful connections to circuit complexity and randomness. Nonuniform reductions have been used to study the isomorphism conjecture for NP and completeness for larger…
A circuit $\mathcal{C}$ samples a distribution $\mathbf{X}$ with an error $\epsilon$ if the statistical distance between the output of $\mathcal{C}$ on the uniform input and $\mathbf{X}$ is $\epsilon$. We study the hardness of sampling a…
Symmetry of information states that $C(x) + C(y|x) = C(x,y) + O(\log C(x))$. We show that a similar relation for online Kolmogorov complexity does not hold. Let the even (online Kolmogorov) complexity of an n-bitstring $x_1x_2... x_n$ be…
A $c$-short program for a string $x$ is a description of $x$ of length at most $C(x) + c$, where $C(x)$ is the Kolmogorov complexity of $x$. We show that there exists a randomized algorithm that constructs a list of $n$ elements that…
Due to M\"{u}ller's theorem, the Kolmogorov complexity of a string was shown to be equal to its quantum Kolmogorov complexity. Thus there are no benefits to using quantum mechanics to compress classical information. The quantitative amount…
Kolmogorov complexity measures the algorithmic complexity of a finite binary string $\sigma$ in terms of the length of the shortest description $\sigma^*$ of $\sigma$. Traditionally, the length of a string is taken to measure the amount of…
Suppose we have a memory storing $0$s and $1$s and we want to estimate the frequency of $1$s by sampling. We want to do this I/O-efficiently, exploiting that each read gives a block of $B$ bits at unit cost; not just one bit. If the input…
We investigate the problem of minimizing the excess generalization error with respect to the best expert prediction in a finite family in the stochastic setting, under limited access to information. We assume that the learner only has…
Kolmogorov complexity of a finite binary word reflects both algorithmic structure and the empirical distribution of symbols appearing in the word. Words with symbol frequencies far from one half have smaller combinatorial richness and…
The main goal of this paper is to put some known results in a common perspective and to simplify their proofs. We start with a simple proof of a result from (Vereshchagin, 2002) saying that $\limsup_n\KS(x|n)$ (here $\KS(x|n)$ is…
We present an algorithm that takes a discrete random variable $X$ and a number $m$ and computes a random variable whose support (set of possible outcomes) is of size at most $m$ and whose Kolmogorov distance from $X$ is minimal. In addition…