Related papers: Kolmogorov complexity and generalized length funct…
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…
Diverse applications of Kolmogorov complexity to learning [CIKK16], circuit complexity [OPS19], cryptography [LP20], average-case complexity [Hir21], and proof search [Kra22] have been discovered in recent years. Since the running time of…
The normalized information distance is a universal distance measure for objects of all kinds. It is based on Kolmogorov complexity and thus uncomputable, but there are ways to utilize it. First, compression algorithms can be used to…
Is it possible to find a shortest description for a binary string? The well-known answer is "no, Kolmogorov complexity is not computable." Faced with this barrier, one might instead seek a short list of candidates which includes a laconic…
Algorithmic information theory studies description complexity and randomness and is now a well known field of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. There are several textbooks and monographs devoted to this theory where one…
Kolmogorov complexity is the length of the ultimately compressed version of a file (that is, anything which can be put in a computer). Formally, it is the length of a shortest program from which the file can be reconstructed. We discuss the…
We survey the diverse approaches to the notion of information content: from Shannon entropy to Kolmogorov complexity. The main applications of Kolmogorov complexity are presented namely, the mathematical notion of randomness (which goes…
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,…
Randomness extraction is the process of constructing a source of randomness of high quality from one or several sources of randomness of lower quality. The problem can be modeled using probability distributions and min-entropy to measure…
We introduce algorithmic information theory, also known as the theory of Kolmogorov complexity. We explain the main concepts of this quantitative approach to defining `information'. We discuss the extent to which Kolmogorov's and Shannon's…
We survey diverse approaches to the notion of information: from Shannon entropy to Kolmogorov complexity. Two of the main applications of Kolmogorov complexity are presented: randomness and classification. The survey is divided in two parts…
There are (at least) three approaches to quantifying information. The first, algorithmic information or Kolmogorov complexity, takes events as strings and, given a universal Turing machine, quantifies the information content of a string as…
We survey diverse approaches to the notion of information: from Shannon entropy to Kolmogorov complexity. Two of the main applications of Kolmogorov complexity are presented: randomness and classification. The survey is divided in two parts…
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 show that the mutual information, in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, of any pair of strings $x$ and $y$ is equal, up to logarithmic precision, to the length of the longest shared secret key that two parties, one having $x$ and the…
We relate the computational complexity of finite strings to universal representations of their underlying symmetries. First, Boolean functions are classified using the universal covering topologies of the circuits which enumerate them. A…
Some established and also novel techniques in the field of applications of algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity currently co-exist for the first time and are here reviewed, ranging from dominant ones such as statistical lossless compression…
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…
The aim of this note is to provide some reference facts for LZW---mostly from Thomas and Cover \cite{Cover:2006aa} and provide a reference for some metrics that can be derived from it. LZW is an algorithm to compute a Kolmogorov Complexity…
We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the expected minimum Kolmogorov complexity of binary classifiers that are consistent with labeled samples. The expected size is not more than complexity of the target concept plus the conditional…