>Art:==
>>You have helped me over the years to distinguish complexity from
>>information, i.e. the same information can be rearranged in different ways,
>>and this rearrangement does increase the complexity. With that
>>understanding, one would have to concede that reading the fossil record as
>>animals through time would indeed show an increase in complexity from
>>bottom to top, even if the organisms at the top are themselves no more
>>complex than those at the bottom, because they are different.
>
>I think I miscommunicated something somewhere. I'll take responsibility
>for that, but I would like to know what I said which led to the
>above conclusions. My view is that information and complexity are
>closely linked, practically identical. For example, my favorite
>measure of complexity is Kolmogorov complexity which also goes by
>algorithmic complexity or alorithmic information content. The
>algorithmic complexity and information content are one and the
>same thing. One can think of this measure as the length (in bits)
>of the shortest description of an object. I think its very natural
>to say that the longer the description, the more information and
>the longer the description, the greater the complexity.
I tried to reason my way through this and tripped up. It was not your
explanations that were the problem, but my failure to exemplify them in the
real world. Also it has been a while since we discussed this.... As you
have stated, information and complexity are impossible for me to separate.
Thanks again.
Art
http://biology.swau.edu