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The author misses the point that Kolmogorov Complexity isn't meant to be used as a practical measurement, but is just a theoretical way to think about informati
by mappum 12y ago
The author misses the point that Kolmogorov Complexity isn't meant to be used as a practical measurement, but is just a theoretical way to think about information. There is no way to measure a string's "Kolmogorov Units", but you can just generally agree that "abababababababababababababababababababab" is less complex than "ababaaabbabaabaababbbabaababbbaaababbbba".
If you really wanted a practical standard measure, the language would have to be simple Turing machine instructions, so that the language implementation isn't more optimized for expressing certain things (which is the problem discussed in the post).
- tromp 12y agoBasing a concrete definition of Kolmogorov complexity on the lambda calculus rather than Turing machines has many advantages. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus for a concrete definition, and a proof that the complexity of the prime numbers is at most 167 bits. This language can be implemented in only 25 lines of C.
- Houshalter 12y agoThe problem the author is hitting on is that there isn't any standard language you can use. Every language will express some things better and other things worse. This is a philosophical problem in how we should do induction. It's also a practical one in creating artificial intelligence.