Abstract

Although information content is invariant up to an additive constant, the range of possible additive constants applicable to programming languages is so large that in practice it plays a major role in the actual evaluation of K(s), the Kolmogorov complexity of a string s. We present a summary of the approach we've developed to overcome the problem by calculating its algorithmic probability and evaluating the algorithmic complexity via the coding theorem, thereby providing a stable framework for Kolmogorov complexity even for short strings. We also show that reasonable formalisms produce reasonable complexity classifications