Large Alphabets and Incompressibility

We briefly survey some concepts related to empirical entropy -- normal numbers, de Bruijn sequences and Markov processes -- and investigate how well it approximates Kolmogorov complexity. Our results suggest $\ell$th-order empirical entropy stops being a reasonable complexity metric for almost all strings of length $m$ over alphabets of size $n$ about when $n^\ell$ surpasses $m$

Algorithmic Complexity for Short Binary Strings Applied to Psychology: A Primer

Since human randomness production has been studied and widely used to assess executive functions (especially inhibition), many measures have been suggested to assess the degree to which a sequence is random-like. However, each of them focuses on one feature of randomness, leading authors to have to use multiple measures. Here we describe and advocate for the use of the accepted universal measure for randomness based on algorithmic complexity, by means of a novel previously presented technique using the the definition of algorithmic probability. A re-analysis of the classical Radio Zenith data in the light of the proposed measure and methodology is provided as a study case of an application.Comment: To appear in Behavior Research Method

Words and Transcendence

Is it possible to distinguish algebraic from transcendental real numbers by considering the $b$-ary expansion in some base $b\ge2$? In 1950, \'E. Borel suggested that the answer is no and that for any real irrational algebraic number $x$ and for any base $g\ge2$, the $g$-ary expansion of $x$ should satisfy some of the laws that are shared by almost all numbers. There is no explicitly known example of a triple $(g,a,x)$, where $g\ge3$ is an integer, $a$ a digit in $\{0,...,g-1\}$ and $x$ a real irrational algebraic number, for which one can claim that the digit $a$ occurs infinitely often in the $g$-ary expansion of $x$. However, some progress has been made recently, thanks mainly to clever use of Schmidt's subspace theorem. We review some of these results

A constructive Borel-Cantelli Lemma. Constructing orbits with required statistical properties

In the general context of computable metric spaces and computable measures we prove a kind of constructive Borel-Cantelli lemma: given a sequence (constructive in some way) of sets $A_{i}$ with effectively summable measures, there are computable points which are not contained in infinitely many $A_{i}$. As a consequence of this we obtain the existence of computable points which follow the \emph{typical statistical behavior} of a dynamical system (they satisfy the Birkhoff theorem) for a large class of systems, having computable invariant measure and a certain ``logarithmic'' speed of convergence of Birkhoff averages over Lipshitz observables. This is applied to uniformly hyperbolic systems, piecewise expanding maps, systems on the interval with an indifferent fixed point and it directly implies the existence of computable numbers which are normal with respect to any base.Comment: Revised version. Several results are generalize