Luke_A_Somers comments on No Logical Positivist I - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2008 01:06AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 22 July 2012 04:32:52PM 0 points [-]

No. You mean you need at least that to represent any such message in a constant-size format. That's not what the complexity is about - if the message is the alphabet and then the rest are spaces, that's the right length and has the right number of symbols, but you can easily compress it to much much less than 381 bytes.

That said, I agree that Java bytecode probably isn't the ideal medium for transmitting such a terse message.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 July 2012 05:02:58PM 1 point [-]

I think past!me miscommunicated and was stupid w.r.t. Kolmogorov Complexity, and I think you have misread the statement too. The program "enumerate all X symbol strings from this Y letter alphabet then choose the Nth" is pretty much one of the simplest ways of encoding a string. So I was merely remarking that to single out one 80 symbol, 27 letter alphabet string, you need at least 381 bits, or you will have incomplete domain coverage due to the pigeon-hole principle.

If we expand the alphabet to 32 letters, then it obviously takes 400 bits, which is 50 bytes.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 30 July 2012 02:48:23PM 2 points [-]

The program "enumerate all X symbol strings from this Y letter alphabet then choose the Nth" is pretty much one of the simplest ways of encoding a string.

A completely arbitrary string, yes. This was nowhere near an arbitrary string.