Related papers: Irreducible Complexity in Pure Mathematics
In algorithmic randomness, when one wants to define a randomness notion with respect to some non-computable measure $\lambda $, a choice needs to be made. One approach is to allow randomness tests to access the measure $\lambda $ as an…
Quantum logic was introduced in 1936 by Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann as a framework for capturing the logical peculiarities of quantum observables. It generalizes, and on 1-dimensional Hilbert space coincides with, Boolean…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
The probability distribution P from which the history of our universe is sampled represents a theory of everything or TOE. We assume P is formally describable. Since most (uncountably many) distributions are not, this imposes a strong…
Mathematics cannot anymore be assimilated to a linguistic game, where formal proofs are strongly differentiated with conjectural thinking, without building any category of knowledge to understand the passage (Wittgenstein's gist). Nowadays,…
We comment on a recent paper by D'Abramo [Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 25 (2005) 29], focusing on the author's statement that an algorithm can produce a list of strings containing at least one string whose algorithmic complexity is greater…
The term complexity derives etymologically from the Latin plexus, which means interwoven. Intuitively, this implies that something complex is composed by elements that are difficult to separate. This difficulty arises from the relevant…
The famous G\"odel incompleteness theorem says that for every sufficiently rich formal theory (containing formal arithmetic in some natural sense) there exist true unprovable statements. Such statements would be natural candidates for being…
In his 1981 Fundamental Theorem of Algebra paper Steve Smale initiated the complexity theory of finding a solution of polynomial equations of one complex variable by a variant of Newton's method. In this paper we reconsider his algorithm in…
Algorithmic statistics has two different (and almost orthogonal) motivations. From the philosophical point of view, it tries to formalize how the statistics works and why some statistical models are better than others. After this notion of…
This is a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Robotics. It is devoted to the study of complexity of complete (or exact) algorithms for robot motion planning. The term ``complete'' indicates that an approach is guaranteed to find the correct…
Algorithmic randomness theory starts with a notion of an individual random object. To be reasonable, this notion should have some natural properties; in particular, an object should be random with respect to image distribution if and only…
The information in an individual finite object (like a binary string) is commonly measured by its Kolmogorov complexity. One can divide that information into two parts: the information accounting for the useful regularity present in the…
With his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein produced a revolution in our conception of reality and of the knowledge we can obtain from it. This revolution can be viewed from philosophy as leading to one of the great paradigms in…
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…
G. Edelman, O. Sporns, and G. Tononi have introduced the neural complexity of a family of random variables, defining it as a specific average of mutual information over subfamilies. We show that their choice of weights satisfies two natural…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
Three philosophical principles are often quoted in connection with Leibniz: "objects sharing the same properties are the same object", "everything can possibly exist, unless it yields contradiction", "the ideal elements correctly determine…
The study of computability has its origin in Hilbert's conference of 1900, where an adjacent question, to the ones he asked, is to give a precise description of the notion of algorithm. In the search for a good definition arose three…
Given a computable sequence of natural numbers, it is a natural task to find a G\"odel number of a program that generates this sequence. It is easy to see that this problem is neither continuous nor computable. In algorithmic learning…