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Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system. | blogjou

Murray Gell-Mann

The Quark and the Jaguar

228
18 Sep 2021

Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system.


Recall that effective complexity is the length of a concise description of the regularities of a system. Some of those regularities can be traced back to the fundamental physical laws governing the universe. Others arise from the fact that many characteristics of a given part of the universe at a given time are related to one another through their common origin in some past incident. Those characteristics have features in common; they exhibit mutual information. For example, automobiles of a given model resemble one another because they all originate from the same design, which contains many arbitrary features that could have been chosen differently. Such “frozen accidents” can make themselves felt in all sort of ways. Looking at coins of King Henry VIII of England, we may reflect upon all the references to him not only on coins but in charters, in documents relating to the seizure of abbeys, and in history books and how those would all be different if his elder brother Arthur had survived to mount the throne instead of him. All those references depend on the same frozen accident.