Complexity and Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Re:Complexity and Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky by ars on Monday November 03, 2008 @09:22PM (#352860)

Talk about a straw man argument! He builds up an entire argument, then shoots it down, and manages to generate pages of text, all based on a flawed premise. I don't agree that you can ignore the size of the working set when defining complexity.

Quite frankly it's idiotic to do so. If you allow that, then why not just create every single possible permutation of every single possible thing? (Not randomly, start at 1 and start counting.)

The complexity of that is 1 bit.

So, basically everything, no matter what, has a complexity of 1 bit.

What a pointless way of defining complexity. (Pointless for talking about the universe anyway, maybe it's useful in more specific math.)

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Re:Complexity and Intelligence by Eliezer Yudkowsky by elijahbuck on Monday November 03, 2008 @10:19PM (#352922)

Everything does not have a complexity of one bit. The object you describe with a complexity of 1 bit doesn't specify the object you want. In the permutation, there may be a string that specifies some universe, but then you have to specify where in the permutation that string is and how long it is, thus increasing the complexity required to describe that particular universe object.

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