Abstract
The most natural approach to defining the quantity of information is clearly to define it in relation to the individual object (be it Homer’s Odyssey or a particular type of dodo) rather than in relation to a set of objects from which the individual object may be selected. To do so, one could define the quantity of information in an object in terms of the number of bits required to losslesly describe it. A description of an object is evidently useful in this sense only if we can reconstruct the full object from this description.
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© 2019 Ming Li and Paul Vitányi
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Li, M., Vitányi, P. (2019). Algorithmic Complexity. In: An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11298-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11298-1_2
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