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An incompressibility theorem for automatic complexity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2021

Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA; E-mail: bjoern.kjos-hanssen@hawaii.edu

Abstract

Shallit and Wang showed that the automatic complexity $A(x)$ satisfies $A(x)\ge n/13$ for almost all $x\in {\{\mathtt {0},\mathtt {1}\}}^n$. They also stated that Holger Petersen had informed them that the constant $13$ can be reduced to $7$. Here we show that it can be reduced to $2+\epsilon $ for any $\epsilon>0$. The result also applies to nondeterministic automatic complexity $A_N(x)$. In that setting the result is tight inasmuch as $A_N(x)\le n/2+1$ for all x.

Information

Type
Theoretical Computer Science
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press