Related papers: The Frequent Paucity of Trivial Strings

Given a set X of finite strings, one interesting question to ask is whether there exists a member of X which is simple conditional to all other members of X. Conditional simplicity is measured by low conditional Kolmogorov complexity. We…

The famous G\"odel incompleteness theorem states that for every consistent sufficiently rich formal theory T there exist true statements that are unprovable in T. Such statements would be natural candidates for being added as axioms, but…

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…

Muchnik's theorem about simple conditional descriptions states that for all strings $a$ and $b$ there exists a short program $p$ transforming $a$ to $b$ that has the least possible length and is simple conditional on $b$. In this paper we…

Chaitin's incompleteness theorem states that sufficiently rich formal systems cannot prove lower bounds on Kolmogorov complexity. In this paper we extend this theorem by showing theories that prove the Kolmogorov complexity of a large (but…

A meta-complexity assumption, Feasible Chaitin Incompleteness (FCI), asserts the hardness of ruling out length $t$ proofs that string $x$ is Kolmogorov random (e.g. $x{\in}R$), by analogy to Chaitin's result that proving $x{\in}R$ is…

We describe an alternative method (to compression) that combines several theoretical and experimental results to numerically approximate the algorithmic (Kolmogorov-Chaitin) complexity of all $\sum_{n=1}^82^n$ bit strings up to 8 bits long,…

This paper proposes new notions of polynomial depth (called monotone poly depth), based on a polynomial version of monotone Kolmogorov complexity. We show that monotone poly depth satisfies all desirable properties of depth notions i.e.,…

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,…

Peter Gacs showed (Gacs 1974) that for every n there exists a bit string x of length n whose plain complexity C(x) has almost maximal conditional complexity relative to x, i.e., C(C(x)|x) > log n - log^(2) n - O(1). (Here log^(2) i = log…

In this paper we prove Chaitin's ``heuristic principle'', {\it the theorems of a finitely-specified theory cannot be significantly more complex than the theory itself}, for an appropriate measure of complexity. We show that the measure is…

In [3] a short proof is given that some strings have maximal plain Kolmogorov complexity but not maximal prefix-free complexity. The proof uses Levin's symmetry of information, Levin's formula relating plain and prefix complexity and Gacs'…

We prove a Kolmogorov complexity variant of the birthday paradox. Sufficiently sized random subsets of strings are guaranteed to have two members x and y with low K(x/y). To prove this, we first show that the minimum conditional Kolmogorov…

A practical measure for the complexity of sequences of symbols (``strings'') is introduced that is rooted in automata theory but avoids the problems of Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity. This physical complexity can be estimated for ensembles…

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…

Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity has long been believed to be impossible to approximate when it comes to short sequences (e.g. of length 5-50). However, with the newly developed \emph{coding theorem method} the complexity of strings of length…

A drawback of Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity (K) as a function from s to the shortest program producing s is its noncomputability which limits its range of applicability. Moreover, when strings are short, the dependence of K on a particular…

Consider a string of $n$ positions, i.e. a discrete string of length $n$. Units of length $k$ are placed at random on this string in such a way that they do not overlap, and as often as possible, i.e. until all spacings between neighboring…

Effective complexity measures the information content of the regularities of an object. It has been introduced by M. Gell-Mann and S. Lloyd to avoid some of the disadvantages of Kolmogorov complexity, also known as algorithmic information…

String complexity is defined as the cardinality of a set of all distinct words (factors) of a given string. For two strings, we introduce the joint string complexity as the cardinality of a set of words that are common to both strings.…