Information Distance Revisited

07/29/2018

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by   Bruno Bauwens, et al.

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We consider the notion of information distance between two objects x and y introduced by Bennett, Gács, Li, Vitanyi, and Zurek [1] as the minimal length of a program that computes x from y as well as computing y from x, and study different versions of this notion. It was claimed by Mahmud [11] that the prefix version of information distance equals max(K(x|y), K(y|) + O(1) (this equality with logarithmic precision was one of the main results of the paper by Bennett, Gács, Li, Vitanyi, and Zurek). We show that this claim is false. [More will be added.]