On the Gap Between Trivial and Nontrivial Initial Segment Prefix-Free Complexity

Abstract

An infinite sequence X is said to have trivial (prefix-free) initial segment complexity if the prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity of each initial segment of X is the same as the complexity of the sequence of 0s of the same length, up to a constant. We study the gap between the minimum complexity K(0ⁿ) and the initial segment complexity of a nontrivial sequence, and in particular the nondecreasing unbounded functions f such that

(⋆)

for a nontrivial sequence X, where K denotes the prefix-free complexity. Our first result is that there exists a $\varDelta^{0}_{3}$ unbounded nondecreasing function f which does not have this property. It is known that such functions cannot be $\varDelta^{0}_{2}$ hence this is an optimal bound on their arithmetical complexity. Moreover it improves the bound $\varDelta^{0}_{4}$ that was known from Csima and Montalbán (Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 134(5):1499–1502, 2006).

Our second result is that if f is $\varDelta^{0}_{2}$ then there exists a non-empty $\varPi^{0}_{1}$ class of reals X with nontrivial prefix-free complexity which satisfy (⋆). This implies that in this case there uncountably many nontrivial reals X satisfying (⋆) in various well known classes from computability theory and algorithmic randomness; for example low for Ω, non-low for Ω and computably dominated reals. A special case of this result was independently obtained by Bienvenu, Merkle and Nies (STACS, pp. 452–463, 2011).