Tristan Hodgson

Presentation on Kolmogorov Complexity

I recently gave an eight minute presentation on Kolmogorov complexity for a varied audience consisting of mathematicians ranging from first year undergraduates to professors. Due to the lack of computer science background of the audience I avoided the formalism of turing machines, to focus the talk on the more mathematically interesting aspects, such as the uncountability of the complexity function. I also illustrated the concept of Normalized Information Distance (NID) using a simple example inspired by the work of Rudi Cilibras and Paul Vitányi, demonstrating how we can use translations of the UN Declaration of Human Rights to reveal relationships between languages .