On Saturday 17 May 2008 04:02:17 pm Brian Foster wrote:
> | In particular, I know what "random" means (in the sense
> | of Kolmogorov). which I suspect no-one else here does.
> | (But I'd be pleased to find I'm wrong in this belief.)
>> algorithmically, you're (probably) talking
> about the shortest turing program to generate
> a given string. an incompressible string is
> one that, as I recall, cannot be written by
> a program shorter than the string.
That would certainly be an adequate definition for me
(possibly only getting 9 out of 10 in an exam,
since there are many Turing machines,
one of which might certainly output a given string
in a very short time).
But my complaint was really about the use of the words
"random", "entropy" and "white noise"
in what seemed to me a less than precise sense.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
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