English

Plain stopping time and conditional complexities revisited

Computational Complexity 2017-10-04 v2 Information Theory math.IT Logic

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the notion of "stopping time complexity", informally defined as the amount of information needed to specify when to stop while reading an infinite sequence. This notion was introduced by Vovk and Pavlovic (2016). It turns out that plain stopping time complexity of a binary string xx could be equivalently defined as (a) the minimal plain complexity of a Turing machine that stops after reading xx on a one-directional input tape; (b) the minimal plain complexity of an algorithm that enumerates a prefix-free set containing xx; (c)~the conditional complexity C(xx)C(x|x*) where xx in the condition is understood as a prefix of an infinite binary sequence while the first xx is understood as a terminated binary string; (d) as a minimal upper semicomputable function KK such that each binary sequence has at most 2n2^n prefixes zz such that K(z)<nK(z)<n; (e) as maxCX(x)\max C^X(x) where CX(z)C^X(z) is plain Kolmogorov complexity of zz relative to oracle XX and the maximum is taken over all extensions XX of xx. We also show that some of these equivalent definitions become non-equivalent in the more general setting where the condition yy and the object xx may differ. We also answer an open question from Chernov, Hutter and~Schmidhuber.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.08100,
  title  = {Plain stopping time and conditional complexities revisited},
  author = {Mikhail Andreev and Gleb Posobin and Alexander Shen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.08100},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:24:34.751Z