An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications

Written by two experts in the field, this is the only comprehensive and unified treatment of the central ideas and applications of Kolmogorov complexity. The book presents a thorough treatment of the subject with a wide range of illustrative applications.

This must-read textbook presents an essential introduction to Kolmogorov complexity (KC), a central theory and powerful tool in information science that deals with the quantity of information in individual objects. The text covers both the fundamental concepts and the most important practical applications, supported by a wealth of didactic features.

This thoroughly revised and enhanced fourth edition includes new and updated material on, amongst other topics, the Miller-Yu theorem, the Gács-Kučera theorem, the Day-Gács theorem, increasing randomness, short lists computable from an input string containing the incomputable Kolmogorov complexity of the input, the Lovász local lemma, sorting, the algorithmic full Slepian-Wolf theorem for individual strings, multiset normalized information distance and normalized web distance, and conditional universal distribution.