4,146 research outputs found
Around Kolmogorov complexity: basic notions and results
Algorithmic information theory studies description complexity and randomness
and is now a well known field of theoretical computer science and mathematical
logic. There are several textbooks and monographs devoted to this theory where
one can find the detailed exposition of many difficult results as well as
historical references. However, it seems that a short survey of its basic
notions and main results relating these notions to each other, is missing.
This report attempts to fill this gap and covers the basic notions of
algorithmic information theory: Kolmogorov complexity (plain, conditional,
prefix), Solomonoff universal a priori probability, notions of randomness
(Martin-L\"of randomness, Mises--Church randomness), effective Hausdorff
dimension. We prove their basic properties (symmetry of information, connection
between a priori probability and prefix complexity, criterion of randomness in
terms of complexity, complexity characterization for effective dimension) and
show some applications (incompressibility method in computational complexity
theory, incompleteness theorems). It is based on the lecture notes of a course
at Uppsala University given by the author
Pushdown Compression
The pressing need for eficient compression schemes for XML documents has
recently been focused on stack computation [6, 9], and in particular calls for
a formulation of information-lossless stack or pushdown compressors that allows
a formal analysis of their performance and a more ambitious use of the stack in
XML compression, where so far it is mainly connected to parsing mechanisms. In
this paper we introduce the model of pushdown compressor, based on pushdown
transducers that compute a single injective function while keeping the widest
generality regarding stack computation. The celebrated Lempel-Ziv algorithm
LZ78 [10] was introduced as a general purpose compression algorithm that
outperforms finite-state compressors on all sequences. We compare the
performance of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm with that of the pushdown compressors,
or compression algorithms that can be implemented with a pushdown transducer.
This comparison is made without any a priori assumption on the data's source
and considering the asymptotic compression ratio for infinite sequences. We
prove that Lempel-Ziv is incomparable with pushdown compressors
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