Doesn't K-complexity have to be relative to some base language? Normally that's a trivial detail but when we get to the level of deciding whether or not to use a specification of the universe as an optimization technique it becomes rather salient.
Why? As long as the translator between two different base languages is much smaller than Finnegans Wake, I don't see the problem.
It would seem that such a trick would usually only provide minimal assistance. After all, more can be said of a single library of congress than of all libraries of congress in a Tegmark level 1 simulation!
That's true. I'm trying to understand if simulating our universe is ever the easiest way to recreate complex things, and from the comments it's seeming less and less likely. In particular, UDASSA presupposes that the easiest way to generate the state of a human mind is to simulate the universe and point to the mind within it, which might easily turn out to be false.
Why? As long as the translator between two different base languages is much smaller than Finnegans Wake, I don't see the problem.
Because if we are deciding whether there are gains to be made by including a simulation of the universe in the compression algorithm. In that case the comparisons to be made are between the representation of a universe simulation, what efficiency this can gain compared to the base language and the translation cost between languages. Since we can expect any benefit to using a universe sim to be rather minimal this matters a lot...
What can we say about the K-complexity of a non-random string from our universe, e.g. the text of Finnegans Wake? It contains lots of patterns making it easy to compress using a regular archiver, but can we do much better than that?
On one hand, the laws of physics in our universe seem to be simple, and generating the text is just a matter of generating our universe then pointing to the text. On the other hand, our evolution involved a lot of quantum randomness, so pointing to humans within the universe could require a whole lot of additional bits above and beyond the laws of physics. So does anyone have good arguments whether the K-complexity of Finnegans Wake is closer to 10% or 0.1% of its length?