The complexity of something is usually defined as the smallest number of bits required to fully describe it (a bit is a zero or a one). For example, a diamond describable as 1024 carbon atoms arranged in a perfectly regular lattice pattern has very low complexity compared to a hard drive with a terabyte of random numbers, since the latter can’t be described with less than a terabyte (about 8 × 1012 bits) of information. Yet that hard drive is much less complex than your brain, where more than a hundred quadrillion (1017) bits of information are needed just to describe the state of its synapses
...more