[Southack]

"... you are correct that it is difficult to extract large programs from unbiased noise streams ... It is also true that a "sufficiently large" program may not be reasonably extractable from an unbiased noise stream in our universe."
119 posted on 3/3/02 11:51 AM Pacific by tortoise

[tortoise]

Your reading comprehension skills and lack of insight are a bit irritating. You don't actually refute any of my technical points. You repeat things that you think mean something and ignore my very pertinent responses to them. Part of the problem here is that your "standards" are utterly arbitrary.

So here is my final attempt. Read Chapter 4 "Algorithmic Probability" in the following text:

An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications
By: Li and Vitanyi
Publisher: Springer-Verlag

This text is the de-facto reference standard for the large body of mathematics loosely associated with the Kolmogorov information theory, but is moderately accessible to someone with a solid grounding in basic mathematics. It is by far the most widely referenced text in academic papers on this topic. This area of mathematics is deeply fundamental to computational processes and software theory of all types.

I have just given you the relevant chapter of THE reference standard for the topic we are discussing, which due to its being a de-facto standard is widely available as such things go (a university library probably has it). If you can show me where my understanding of the mathematics contradicts the text, I will very publicly apologize and admit that you are correct. It is certainly possible that I am wrong, but since I'm extraordinarily competent at that area of mathematics and have used it for years to successfully design very sophisticated systems, I find it improbable.

I believe this is reasonable. Why waste our time arguing about it when we can go straight to the source. Unless, of course, you doubt the validity of that branch of mathematics despite its widespread practical application.