Structural Information in Two-Dimensional Patterns: Entropy Convergence and Excess Entropy

We develop information-theoretic measures of spatial structure and pattern in more than one dimension. As is well known, the entropy density of a two-dimensional configuration can be efficiently and accurately estimated via a converging sequence of conditional entropies. We show that the manner in which these conditional entropies converge to their asymptotic value serves as a measure of global correlation and structure for spatial systems in any dimension. We compare and contrast entropy-convergence with mutual-information and structure-factor techniques for quantifying and detecting spatial structure.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, http://www.santafe.edu/projects/CompMech/papers/2dnnn.htm

On demand string sorting over unbounded alphabets

On-demand string sorting is the problem of preprocessing a set of strings to allow subsequent queries for finding the k lexicographically smallest strings (and afterward the next k etc.) This on-demand variant strongly resembles the search engine queries which give you the best k-ranked pages recurringly. We present a data structure that supports this in O (n) preprocessing time, where n is the number of strings, and answer queries in O (log n) time. There is also a cost of O (N) time amortized over all operations, where N is the total length of the strings. Our data structure is a heap of strings, which supports heapify and delete-mins. As it turns out, implementing a full heap with all operations is not that simple. For the sake of completeness, we propose a heap with full operations based on balanced indexing trees that supports the heap operations in optimal times