Related papers: Irreducible Complexity in Pure Mathematics
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
In 1686 in his Discours de Metaphysique, Leibniz points out that if an arbitrarily complex theory is permitted then the notion of "theory" becomes vacuous because there is always a theory. This idea is developed in the modern theory of…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
Some Goedel centenary reflections on whether incompleteness is really serious, and whether mathematics should be done somewhat differently, based on using algorithmic complexity measured in bits of information. [Enriques lecture given…
Transcript of G.J. Chaitin's 2 March 2000 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture. The notion of randomness is taken from physics and applied to pure mathematics in order to shed light on the…
In 1931, G\"odel presented in K\"onigsberg his famous Incompleteness Theorem, stating that some true mathematical statements are unprovable. Yet, this result gives us no idea about those independent (that is, true and unprovable)…
We survey the Kolmogorov's approach to the notion of randomness through the Kolmogorov complexity theory. The original motivation of Kolmogorov was to give up a quantitative definition of information. In this theory, an object is randomness…
In this paper the author presents some non-conventional thoughts on the complexity of the Universe and the algorithmic reproducibility of the human brain, essentially sparked off by the notion of algorithmic complexity. We must warn that…
Linear logic was conceived in 1987 by Girard and, in contrast to classical logic, restricts the usage of the structural inference rules of weakening and contraction. With this, atoms of the logic are no longer interpreted as truth, but as…
This paper, which is dedicated to Alan Turing on the 50th anniversary of his death, gives an overview and discusses the philosophical implications of incompleteness, uncomputability and randomness.
This expository paper advocates an approach to physics in which ``typicality" is identified with a suitable form of algorithmic randomness. To this end various theorems from mathematics and physics are reviewed. Their original versions…
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…
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…
Incompleteness theorems of Godel, Turing, Chaitin, and Algorithmic Information Theory have profound epistemological implications. Incompleteness limits our ability to ever understand every observable phenomenon in the universe.…
Algorithmic information theory roots the concept of information in computation rather than probability. These lecture notes were constructed in conjunction with the graduate course I taught at Universit\`a della Svizzera italiana in the…
Two philosophical applications of the concept of program-size complexity are discussed. First, we consider the light program-size complexity sheds on whether mathematics is invented or discovered, i.e., is empirical or is a priori. Second,…
The 75th anniversary of Turing's seminal paper and his centennial year anniversary occur in 2011 and 2012, respectively. It is natural to review and assess Turing's contributions in diverse fields in the light of new developments that his…
The notion of an individual random sequence goes back to von Mises. We describe the evolution of this notion, especially the use of martingales (suggested by Ville), and the development of algorithmic information theory in 1960s and 1970s…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
In 1927 Heisenberg discovered that the ``more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa''. Four years later G\"odel showed that a finitely specified, consistent formal…