Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jondeval 1313 days ago
> Surely not everything is so incredibly compressible, is it?

I like your line of thinking and I'm actually quite excited about this recent shift in physics to a more information-theoretic line of inquiry.

Is it fair to state a corollary of your question this way? Given a complete description of some hypothesized universe/multiverse generator (essentially the next layer down that we are actively trying to discover), the Kolmogorov complexity (or some variation of K-Complexity) of this description must be greater than the K-complexity of any generated universe.

In my view, it would be very weird if this were not true. And (to me) it would be even weirder if this K-complexity was some large number but still less than infinity.

1 comments

You could have an incredibly simple universe generator that just produces universes with random laws of physics and random initial conditions. From our human point of view that's indistinguishable from a highly sophisticated universe generator, since we can only observe the successes (or rather only one, that by our definition is a success)