🚀 go-pugleaf

>From:    Declan Malone <maloned@ul.ie>

>                            Now how do you measure randomness in an
>objective way?  You can't really, and the irony of it is that the more
>you try, and the more objective/detailed your description becomes...

Grep Chaitin has done some excellent work on this (he had a general-
audience paper in a reasonably recent Scientific American, I think),
and has perfectly objective measures of randomness that also seem to
jibe very nicely with intuition.  The basic idea is that you can
measure the randomness of a string of bits by finding the smallest
program for some standard Turing Machine that produces those bits.
For a very random bitstring, of course, the smallest program simply
contains the string itself as data, and prints it out.  For very
non-random strings (0000000...), the corresponding program is
obviously simpler.  (This is a very rough description; if it seems
wrong to you, it probably is, and you're best off finding the original
papers rather than arguing with me about it!)

This agrees rather nicely with Bill Arnold's suggestion that we
measure polymorphism by how many lines of code we have to add to make
a detector...  *8)

DC