Abstract
Suppose we want to describe a given object by a finite binary string. We do not care whether the object has many descriptions; however, each description should describe but one object. Prom among all descriptions of an object we can take the length of the shortest description as a measure of the object’s complexity. It is natural to call an object ‘simple’ if it has at least one short description, and to call it ‘complex’ if all of its descriptions are long.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Li, M., Vitányi, P. (1993). Preliminaries. In: An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications. Texts and Monographs in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3860-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3860-5_1
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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