Abstract
Intuitively, information and complexity go together. We feel that a complex message must contain more information then a simple one. Complexity is, however, an illusive property. A Mandelbrot fractal pattern may look intricate, indeed, but to a mathematician it is simple. No more information than a small piece of computer program is needed to reproduce the pattern.
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Reference
In this form not a paradox, “all that follows is that Epimenides is a liar and that at least one Cretan is truthful” Smullyan, 1990, p.226. The real paradox is that an islander lies. I can assure that all islanders (mostly fishermen and sailors) are always truthful, because I am myself from the Åland Islands.
G.J. Chaitin: “A theory of program size formally identical to information theory”, J.ACM 22 (1975), pp. 329..340.
Our private psychological probabilities may induce us to predict the unpredictable, as manifested in “the Monte Carlo fallacy, which makes us expect a failure after a run of successes, and vice versa” Cohen, 1954, p.34.
A. Pickering: Constructing Quarks/Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1984. Related in Gribbin, 1996, p. 198.
Based on the hypothesis that every culture by necessity goes through a cycle of spring-summer-fall-winter Spengler, 1923, p.68.
Identical as a problem to Bertrand’s box paradox Blackburn, 1996, p.44.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Kåhre, J. (2002). Algorithmic Information. In: The Mathematical Theory of Information. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 684. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0975-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0975-2_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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