Exploring RANDOMNESS

by Gregory Chaitin

In The Unknowable I use LISP to compare my work on incompleteness with that of G6del and Turing, and in The Limits of Mathematics I use LISP to discuss my work on incompleteness in more detail. In this book we'll use LISP to explore my theory of randomness, called algorithmic information theory (AIT). And when I say "explore" I mean it! This book is full of exercises for the reader, ranging from the mathematical equivalent oftrivial "fin­ ger warm-ups" for pianists, to substantial programming projects, to questions I can formulate precisely but don't know how to answer, to questions that I don't even know how to formulate precisely! I really want you to follow my example and hike offinto the wilder­ ness and explore AIT on your own! You can stay on the trails that I've blazed and explore the well-known part of AIT, or you can go off on your own and become a fellow researcher, a colleague of mine! One way or another, the goal of this book is to make you into a participant, not a passive observer of AlT. In other words, it's too easy to just listen to a recording of AIT, that's not the way to learn music.

Genres: Mathematics

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 25, 2001

About the author

Gregory Chaitin is widely known for his work on metamathematics and for his discovery of the celebrated Omega number, which proved the fundamental unknowability of math. He is the author of many books on mathematics, including Meta Math! The Quest for Omega. Proving Darwin is his first book on biology. Chaitin was for many years at the IBM Watson Research Center in New York. The research described in this book was carried out at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where Chaitin is now a professor. An Argentine-American, he is an honorary professor at the University of Buenos Aires and has an honorary doctorate from the National University of Cordoba, the oldest university in Argentina.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I normally don’t do this, but I’m going to copy/paste this review across three separate books: Chaitin’s “The Unknowable”, “The Limits of Mathematics”, and “Exploring Randomness”.

All three are all thin, overpriced, but very approachable books on Algorithmic Information Theory. Themes include:

- Undecidability, as the basis of formulating a new kind of randomness measure for numbers that have already been generated (not just restricting randomness measures to the processes that generate numbers).

- Chaitin’s Omega constant, which is the probability that universal Turning machine will halt on random input. This constant is “maximally unknowable”, but that doesn’t stop one from performing math with it.

- Philosophy surrounding these topics.

One might underestimate Kolmogorov’s contributions, given how ridiculously self-promoting Chaitin has been with this AIT. However, the topics are interesting enough that he’s easy to forgive. And he uses many code demonstrations (LISP) to make concrete examples out of the math.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was ok. A bit too much transcribed talks pasted together. Chaitin suffers from not being able to explain himself very well. I am hoping that Calude's book does a better job.