Between Order and Chaos: The Quest for Meaningful Information

The notion of meaningful information seems to be associated with the sweet spot between order and chaos. This form of meaningfulness of information, which is primarily what science is interested in, is not captured by both Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity. In this paper I develop a theo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory of computing systems Vol. 45; no. 4; pp. 650 - 674
Main Author: Adriaans, Pieter
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer-Verlag 01.11.2009
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Algorithms
Complexity theory
Computer Science
Data compression
Datasets
Entropy
Learning
Optimization
Science
Studies
Theory of Computation
Thermodynamics
Universe
Thermodynamics
Meaningful information
MDL
Two-part code optimization
Randomness deficiency
Algorithmic esthetics
Learning as compression
Free energy
ISSN:1432-4350, 1433-0490
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The notion of meaningful information seems to be associated with the sweet spot between order and chaos. This form of meaningfulness of information, which is primarily what science is interested in, is not captured by both Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity. In this paper I develop a theoretical framework that can be seen as a first approximation to a study of meaningful information. In this context I introduce the notion of facticity of a data set. I discuss the relation between thermodynamics and algorithmic complexity theory in the context of this problem. I prove that, under adequate measurement conditions, the free energy of a system in the world is associated with the randomness deficiency of a data set with observations about this system. These insights suggest an explanation of the efficiency of human intelligence in terms of helpful distributions. Finally I give a critical discussion of Schmidhuber’s views specifically his notion of low complexity art, I defend the view that artists optimize facticity instead.
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ISSN:1432-4350
1433-0490
DOI:10.1007/s00224-009-9173-y