Related papers: From Philosophy to Program Size
Theoretical complexity is a vital subfield of computer science that enables us to mathematically investigate computation and answer many interesting queries about the nature of computational problems. It provides theoretical tools to assess…
To better understand the deep significance of our best physical theories it could be interesting to compare our Universe with its models. It may happen that the differences between the model and reality can be made indistinguishable, to the…
Using the theory of Kolmogorov complexity the notion of facticity {\phi}(x) of a string is defined as the amount of self-descriptive information it contains. It is proved that (under reasonable assumptions: the existence of an empty machine…
The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…
In modern science the efficient numerical treatment of high-dimensional problems becomes more and more important. A fundamental insight of the theory of information-based complexity (IBC for short) is that the computational hardness of a…
We study the algebraic theory of computable functions, which can be viewed as arising from possibly non-halting computer programs or algorithms, acting on some state space, equipped with operations of composition, {\em if-then-else} and…
Computational problems can be classified according to their algorithmic complexity, which is defined based on how the resources needed to solve the problem, e.g. the execution time, scale with the problem size. Many problems in…
For a broad class of input-output maps, arguments based on the coding theorem from algorithmic information theory (AIT) predict that simple (low Kolmogorov complexity) outputs are exponentially more likely to occur upon uniform random…
On the real numbers, the notions of a semi-decidable relation and that of an effectively enumerable relation differ. The second only seems to be adequate to express, in an algorithmic way, non deterministic physical theories, where…
Quantitative aspects of computation are important and sometimes essential in characterising the behavior and determining the properties of systems. They are related to the use of physical quantities (storage space, time, bandwidth, etc.) as…
Due to common misconceptions about the Church-Turing thesis, it has been widely assumed that the Turing machine provides an upper bound on what is computable. This is not so. The new field of hypercomputation studies models of computation…
While quantum computers hold the promise of significant computational speedups, the limited size of early quantum machines motivates the study of space-bounded quantum computation. We relate the quantum space complexity of computing a…
Recent theoretical results confirm that quantum theory provides the possibility of new ways of performing efficient calculations. The most striking example is the factoring problem. It has recently been shown that computers that exploit…
Greater theorizing of methods in the computational humanities is needed for epistemological and interpretive clarity, and therefore the maturation of the field. In this paper, we frame such modeling work as engaging in translation work from…
The word "complexity" is most often used as a meta--linguistic expression referring to certain intuitive characteristics of a natural system and/or its scientific description. These characteristics may include: sheer amount of data that…
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…
We initiate a study of the complexity of quantum field theories (QFTs) by proposing a measure of information contained in a QFT and its observables. We show that from minimal assertions, one is naturally led to measure complexity by two…
Complexity theory can be viewed as the study of the relationship between computation and applications, understood the former as complexity classes and the latter as problems. Completeness results are clearly central to that view. Many…
In computability theory and computable analysis, finite programs can compute infinite objects. Presenting a computable object via any program for it, provides at least as much information as presenting the object itself, written on an…
Inspired by the notion that physical systems can contain only a finite amount of information or complexity, we introduce a framework that allows for quantifying the amount of logical information needed to specify a function or set. We then…