Russell Standish writes: > On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 04:20:27PM -0700, "Hal Finney" wrote: > >=20 > > Right, that is one of the big selling points of the Tegmark and > > Schmidhuber concept, that the Big Bang apparently can be described in > > very low-information terms. Tegmark even has a paper arguing that it > > took "zero information" to describe it (but frankly I am getting pretty > > turned off on the "zero information" concept since several people here > > use it to describe completely different things, and if it really took > > zero information then there couldn't be more than one thing described, > > could it?). > >=20 > > Tegmark does not say his model has "zero information" (at least not in > the classic 1998 paper). His words were (pg 25 of my copy): > > "In this sense, our "ultimate ensemble" of all mathematical structures > has virtually no algorithmic complexity at all." > > Note, this is not zero, but simply small (at least compared with the > observed complexity of our frog perspective).
Thanks for the correction. I was actually thinking of a different Tegmark paper, http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/nihilo.html, but I see on closer reading that he also says there that the algorithmic information content of our universe is "close to zero" but does not actually say it is zero. > There is only one zero information object, and that is the set of all > descriptions (all infinite length bitstrings).=20 Do you really think there is such a thing as a "zero information object"? If so, why do you have to say what it is? :-) Is this just an informal concept or is there some formalization of it? Surely Chaitin's algorithmic information theory would not work; inputting a zero length program into a typical UTM would not produce the set of all infinite length bitstrings; in fact, I don't see how a TM could even create such an output from any program. Hal Finney
