Published 2004
| public
Book Section - Chapter
Effective Complexity
- Creators
- Gell-Mann, Murray
- Lloyd, Seth
Abstract
It would take a great many different concepts-or quantities-to capture all of our notions of what is meant by complexity (or its opposite, simplicity). However, the notion that corresponds most closely to what we mean by complexity in ordinary conversation and in most scientific discourse is "effective complexity." In nontechnical language, we can define the effective complexity (EC) of an entity as the length of a highly compressed description of its regularities [6, 7, 8]. For a more technical definition, we need a formal approach both to the notion of minimum description length and to the distinction between regularities and those features that are treated as random or incidental.
Additional Information
© 2004 Oxford University Press. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under the Nanoscale Modeling and Simulation initiative. In addition, the work of Murray Cell-Mann was supported by the C.O.U.Q. Foundation and by Insight Venture Management. The generous help provided by these organizations is gratefully acknowledged.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 60501
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150925-071106702
- NSF
- COUQ Foundation
- Insight Venture Management
- Created
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2015-09-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Series Name
- Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity