army1987 comments on Recognizing Intelligence - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 November 2008 11:22PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 27 September 2013 11:11:45AM *  3 points [-]

a pile of mud is incredibly complex -- it would require an absurd amount of information to create an exactly equal pile of mud

Using this definition, everything containing the same number of atoms would be equally complex; you have to specify where each atom is. This does not feel correct. The authors modified the word complexity to something meaningless; and it most likely did not happen accidentally.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 September 2013 02:09:58AM 1 point [-]

Using this definition, everything containing the same number of atoms would be equally complex; you have to specify where each atom is.

Not really. You can describe a diamond of pure carbon-12 at 0 K with much less information than that. (But IAWYC -- there should be some measure of ‘complexity I care about’ by which music would rank higher than both silence (zero information-theoretical complexity) and white noise (maximum complexity).)

Comment author: gwern 28 September 2013 02:46:48AM 1 point [-]

But IAWYC -- there should be some measure of ‘complexity I care about’ by which music would rank higher than both silence (zero information-theoretical complexity) and white noise (maximum complexity).

How about the measures 'sophistication' or 'logical depth'? Alternately, you could take a Schmidhuber tack and define interestingness as the derivative of compression rate.