Related papers: Busy beavers and Kolmogorov complexity
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 argued that the concept of information exists also in problems with no underlying stochastic model (as Shannon's information representation) for instance, the information contained in an algorithm or in the genome. He introduced…
The field of computational complexity is concerned both with the intrinsic hardness of computational problems and with the efficiency of algorithms to solve them. Given such a problem, normally one designs an algorithm to solve it and sets…
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…
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…
The upper limit on what is computable in our universe is unknown, but widely believed to be set by the Turing machine -- with a function being physically computable if and only if it is Turing-computable. I show how this apparently mild…
In this paper, we introduce complexity-aware planning for finite-horizon deterministic finite automata with rewards as outputs, based on Kolmogorov complexity. Kolmogorov complexity is considered since it can detect computational…
We study the computably enumerable sets in terms of the: (a) Kolmogorov complexity of their initial segments; (b) Kolmogorov complexity of finite programs when they are used as oracles. We present an extended discussion of the existing…
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…
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…
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…
It is not obvious what fraction of all the potential information residing in the molecules and structures of living systems is significant or meaningful to the system. Sets of random sequences or identically repeated sequences, for example,…
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,…
TThe problem is to identify a probability associated with a set of natural numbers, given an infinite data sequence of elements from the set. If the given sequence is drawn i.i.d. and the probability mass function involved (the target)…
We study the minimal complexity of tilings of a plane with a given tile set. We note that every tile set admits either no tiling or some tiling with O(n) Kolmogorov complexity of its n-by-n squares. We construct tile sets for which this…
Kolmogorov (1965) defined the complexity of a string $x$ as the minimal length of a program generating $x$. Obviously this definition depends on the choice of the programming language. Kolmogorov noted that there exist \emph{optimal}…
Algorithmic statistics studies explanations of observed data that are good in the algorithmic sense: an explanation should be simple i.e. should have small Kolmogorov complexity and capture all the algorithmically discoverable regularities…
Solovay proved that there exists a computable upper bound f of the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity function K such that f (x) = K(x) for infinitely many x. In this paper, we consider the class of computable functions f such that K(x) <= f…
The notion of Kolmogorov complexity (=the minimal length of a program that generates some object) is often useful as a kind of language that allows us to reformulate some notions and therefore provide new intuition. In this survey we…
We develop a theory of the algorithmic information in bits contained in an individual pure quantum state. This extends classical Kolmogorov complexity to the quantum domain retaining classical descriptions. Quantum Kolmogorov complexity…