English

List approximation for increasing Kolmogorov complexity

Computational Complexity 2017-02-07 v4 Information Theory math.IT Logic

Abstract

It is impossible to effectively modify a string in order to increase its Kolmogorov complexity. But is it possible to construct a few strings, not longer than the input string, so that most of them have larger complexity? We show that the answer is yes. We present an algorithm that on input a string xx of length nn returns a list with O(n2)O(n^2) many strings, all of length nn, such that 99\% of them are more complex than xx, provided the complexity of xx is less than nloglognO(1)n - \log \log n - O(1). We obtain similar results for other parameters, including a polynomial-time construction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.05984,
  title  = {List approximation for increasing Kolmogorov complexity},
  author = {Marius Zimand},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.05984},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This version corrects a bug in the previous version, which unfortunately is published in the proceedings of STACS 2017. Theorem 1.1 holds with parameters that are slightly weaker than previously claimed

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:54:52.234Z