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Antievolution.org Discussion Board > From the Panda's Thumb > After the Bar Closes... > Complexity vs. Information

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Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,14:35    Here: http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008....on.html this cat writes: Quote Just in casual terms, complexity is a description of the "number of discrete and differentiated parts", and information is "reduction in uncertainty". Complexity and information are related on some level, and those terms do often occur together in computing and information theoretic contexts. But complexity is not information, any more than mass is acceleration. is this a fair statement, especially concerning the layman definitions? -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

Henry J Posts: 5786 Joined: Mar. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,15:12    That definition for "complexity" seems reasonable to me. On information, I'd say that in casual usage, information is data that's useful to somebody. So whether a datum is information or not is relative; it depends on whether the entity possessing it finds it useful. Seems like the concepts are referring to entirely different things. Henry

jeannot Posts: 1201 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,15:22    Quote (Henry J @ Aug. 26 2008,15:12) That definition for "complexity" seems reasonable to me. On information, I'd say that in casual usage, information is data that's useful to somebody. Which is why "information" is subjective and irrelevant to the reality of evolution.

Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,15:36    I'd agree. Let X = "the complete works of Shakespeare" Does X now have more information? Sorta.. but only by context. -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

SoonerintheBluegrass Posts: 39 Joined: May 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,16:04    If i'm not horribly mistaken-- and there's something like a 99.9% certainty I am-- in theoretical physics, isn't information in a very broad sense defined as everything in the universe (i.e., all matter/energy)?  The only difference, then, between one particle and another is how it is organized, either as the bits and pieces that make up an atom, and/or some particle/wave in the EM spectrum or a manifestation of the weak/strong force/gravity (at least in some hypotheses).  And that a corollary of this is effectively that no information is ever lost (except, maybe, in a black hole, although IIRC, the jury's still out on that one).   But even if I were somehow right, it wouldn't mean squat to the IDists with regard to biology.  It's doubtful that any real chemist or physicist would say some intelligence was required to have this information organized in such a way or complexity in some special way to produce a living organism-- or at least not self-replicating molecules that could provide the basis for what a biologist would call life. -------------- "And heaven will smell like the airport But I may not get there to prove it So let's not waste our time thinking how that ain't fair." Neko Case

dnmlthr Posts: 565 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,16:34    Does compressibility play into this? That is, how much do you need to know to recreate a document*? Consider a document containing the complete works of Shakespeare, I'd expect it to be reasonably compressable, likewise a document of the same size containing only the same letter over and over again. But how about a document of the same size that contains completely random characters? Which one of these contain the most information? Which one is the most complex? The Shakespeare document would certainly seem to contain the most usable information (in the context of a human reader), but I'd expect it to not be the least compressible. It's getting late, so I'll just leave you with this confused comment, hopefully to come back at a time when my brain isn't mush. * For the sake of discussion, I'll talk about a simple text document sans metadata -------------- Guess what? I don't give a flying f*ck how "science works" - Ftk

Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,16:47    There's still context in the compressibility - in your example it might be the rules for English and a semantic understanding, in pure technology it may be adequately described by the codec - or maybe not, perhaps it is also the operating system the codec runs on? -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:03    Quote (dnmlthr @ Aug. 26 2008,17:34) Does compressibility play into this? That is, how much do you need to know to recreate a document*? Consider a document containing the complete works of Shakespeare, I'd expect it to be reasonably compressable, likewise a document of the same size containing only the same letter over and over again. But how about a document of the same size that contains completely random characters? To test this in a first-order, amateurish way, I got the full text of Hamlet and saved it in a text file. It was 197 kb. When I zipped it, the zip file was 72kb. 36% the size of the original. I also made a text file of one letter over and over about 180,000 times, roughly the same length as Hamlet, and the file size was around 176 kb. When I zipped that, the file was 4kb, around 2% of the original. And in fact it's probably less and 4kb is just some kind of minimum file size on my machine. A file that was completely, truly random would be basically incompressible, and the zipped file would be 100% the size of the original. (various caveats go here: zipping isn't perfect compression, I are not a information theorist, etc etc.)

dogdidit Posts: 315 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:11    Lossless compression simply eliminates the redundancy. Shannon estimated the redundancy of English at 50%, so 2:1 reduction should be possible without loss of information. As for dnmlthr's question, the text with random symbols by definition has more "information" than a similarly sized copy of Shakespeare. Semantically, it could be reduced to RAND(N) for all any human reader would care, but (per Shannon) the "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem". In contrast, the document consisting of "AAAAAAAAA" is readily compressed to a couple of parameters (namely "A" and the number of A's). Compression (and for that matter, coding) does need to know what set of symbols to be used. If stevestory repeats his test with a string of random characters, I'll bet he sees no file size reduction after zipping. That's because the message has no redundancy to be removed. -------------- "Humans carry plants and animals all over the globe, thus introducing them to places they could never have reached on their own. That certainly increases biodiversity." - D'OL

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:32    Quote (dogdidit @ Aug. 26 2008,18:11) If stevestory repeats his test with a string of random characters, I'll bet he sees no file size reduction after zipping. That's because the message has no redundancy to be removed. Interestingly that didn't happen. Having read an Erv post recently, I went to google and said "Gives me the random numbars pleez" and it sent me to Random.org and I got 10,000 numbers in a single column and put that in a text file and it said "Your filez are 38.2 kilobytes LOLZ" and when I zipped it it became 16 kilobytes. Not sure what's going on there. Maybe, because i had the numbars delivered in 1 columnz, there was like an End of Line charactar that was stripped out and that was the compressian diffarance. Kthanxbi!

steve_h Posts: 544 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:35    Shakespeare's works don't just contain information and they are not just complex - they contain complex specified information!!one! For instance, in Macbeth, the number of possible arrangements of the words is, from the arse, more than 10^1050. But M. is also independantly specified by the short spec, "Scottish dude meets pushy wife, ghost, Kristinewitches, spot,  maybe a knife and (*spoiler alert*) gets deaded", which can probably be further reduced by zipping.

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:39    We should kick back with some beverages. We've already, on this thread, done more actual Information Theory work than the IDiots have done in 15 years.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:42    Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2008,23:39) We should kick back with some beverages. We've already, on this thread, done more actual Information Theory work than the IDiots have done in 15 years. And you have conveniently duplicated your post. Mutate just one copy and you've INCREASED the information in this thread. Which of course we know is impossible because it violates the SLOT or something. Louis -------------- Bye.

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:46    That's okay. I heard from Davetard that every time he writes a sentence he violates the SLoT.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:50    Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2008,23:46) That's okay. I heard from Davetard that every time he writes a sentence he violates the SLoT. Impossible, because anything Davetard does is, by definition, not an intelligently designed act. ;-) Louis -------------- Bye.

dogdidit Posts: 315 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:51    Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2008,17:32)   Quote (dogdidit @ Aug. 26 2008,18:11) If stevestory repeats his test with a string of random characters, I'll bet he sees no file size reduction after zipping. That's because the message has no redundancy to be removed. Interestingly that didn't happen. Having read an Erv post recently, I went to google and said "Gives me the random numbars pleez" and it sent me to Random.org and I got 10,000 numbers in a single column and put that in a text file and it said "Your filez are 38.2 kilobytes LOLZ" and when I zipped it it became 16 kilobytes. Not sure what's going on there. Maybe, because i had the numbars delivered in 1 columnz, there was like an End of Line charactar that was stripped out and that was the compressian diffarance. Kthanxbi! Lost my bet. Farg. I shall now eat me a beer. -------------- "Humans carry plants and animals all over the globe, thus introducing them to places they could never have reached on their own. That certainly increases biodiversity." - D'OL

Doc Bill Posts: 1039 Joined: April 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:54    Romeo and Juliette compressed: Misunderstanding results in young lovers committing suicide. Now, the original play provides a lot more details but, basically, that's what happens. Could one argue that my short synopsis is the "information" and the complete play only adds noise? Or, if I randomly included paragraphs from Moby Dick into Romeo and Juliette would that be adding information? The problem that ID faces is that the cdesign proponentists are unable to define either "information" or "complexity" or "design" objectively which would prove or disprove my silly examples. They rely upon layman subjectivity to skirt the rigor that is required. Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael!  Where for art thou Ishmael!

dogdidit Posts: 315 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,17:55    Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2008,17:32)   Quote (dogdidit @ Aug. 26 2008,18:11) If stevestory repeats his test with a string of random characters, I'll bet he sees no file size reduction after zipping. That's because the message has no redundancy to be removed. Interestingly that didn't happen. Having read an Erv post recently, I went to google and said "Gives me the random numbars pleez" and it sent me to Random.org and I got 10,000 numbers in a single column and put that in a text file and it said "Your filez are 38.2 kilobytes LOLZ" and when I zipped it it became 16 kilobytes. Not sure what's going on there. Maybe, because i had the numbars delivered in 1 columnz, there was like an End of Line charactar that was stripped out and that was the compressian diffarance. Kthanxbi! Heywaitaminnit. Random numbers .ne. random text. Winzip cheeted. Or cheeto'd. Or something. *eats another beer* -------------- "Humans carry plants and animals all over the globe, thus introducing them to places they could never have reached on their own. That certainly increases biodiversity." - D'OL

Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,18:13    Quote (Doc Bill @ Aug. 26 2008,17:54) Romeo and Juliette compressed: Misunderstanding results in young lovers committing suicide. Now, the original play provides a lot more details but, basically, that's what happens. Could one argue that my short synopsis is the "information" and the complete play only adds noise? Or, if I randomly included paragraphs from Moby Dick into Romeo and Juliette would that be adding information? The problem that ID faces is that the cdesign proponentists are unable to define either "information" or "complexity" or "design" objectively which would prove or disprove my silly examples. They rely upon layman subjectivity to skirt the rigor that is required. Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael!  Where for art thou Ishmael! in this case theirs a qualitative aspect to information, which is subjective. -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

Wesley R. Elsberry Posts: 4991 Joined: May 2002 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,18:14    Antievolutionists want to confuse and conflate meaning and information. Spetner, Gitt, Truman, and Dembski... all of them want meaning to be folded within whatever sort of "information" they propose. Shannon's discussion of information explicitly excluded meaning. Algorithmic information theory only cares about one aspect of meaning: what is the shortest program and input that can generate a string? Critique of Dembski's "complex specified information" -------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

midwifetoad Posts: 4003 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,20:07    Quote A file that was completely, truly random would be basically incompressible, and the zipped file would be 100% the size of the original. Just to show how screwed up intuitive concepts can be, the digits of pi are believed to be "random" in the sense that an arbitrary sequence of digits taken from pi cannot be distinguished from a sequence generated by quantum phenomena. In another sense, the digits of pi are believed to contain every possible string of finite length. And yet pi can be generated by a simple algorithm. -------------- Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

dhogaza Posts: 525 Joined: Feb. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,20:20    Quote Heywaitaminnit. Random numbers .ne. random text. Winzip cheeted. Or cheeto'd. Or something. Even worse, they're not random BYTES.  You need a file filled up with bytes which randomly contain the values 0-255, not random values from the subsite 0 through 9 plus newline. Try your zip on a JPEG, for instance.

midwifetoad Posts: 4003 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,20:54    Actual data, image size 100x100 pixel, White square, and same size square after Photoshop noise filter applied (looks like confetti). Saved with no compression and two kinds of lossless compression.     Object              .bmp      .tif         .psd white, 100x100 px   29.3k     7.83k      8.25k Noise, 100x100 px   29.3k    35.40k     44.60k -------------- Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,21:21    Quote (midwifetoad @ Aug. 26 2008,20:54) Actual data, image size 100x100 pixel, White square, and same size square after Photoshop noise filter applied (looks like confetti). Saved with no compression and two kinds of lossless compression.     Object              .bmp      .tif         .psd white, 100x100 px   29.3k     7.83k      8.25k Noise, 100x100 px   29.3k    35.40k     44.60k clearly there's a market for a metaformat that dynamically pics the best compression format - the added carrier cost for the 'format switch' would be minuscule... © 2008 - AtBC Labs -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

Henry J Posts: 5786 Joined: Mar. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,21:28    Quote Having read an Erv post recently, I went to google and said "Gives me the random numbars pleez" and it sent me to Random.org and I got 10,000 numbers in a single column and put that in a text file and it said "Your filez are 38.2 kilobytes LOLZ" and when I zipped it it became 16 kilobytes. Not sure what's going on there. Numbers are easy to compress. The only characters involved are digits, maybe a period, maybe a + or - sign, and a separator between entries. Represent each of those by a value from 0 to 15, and each character fits in one nibble (4 bits) instead of the byte (8 bits) needed for the whole ASCII character. Now about compressing that string of random characters - whether that can be compressed depends on how many character code values are used. If it's limited to ASCII characters, then only 96 of the 256 possible values are used, so it would be possible to store it so that the average bits used per character is 6 and a fraction. Not a terribly large compression, but not zero. Henry

dogdidit Posts: 315 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,21:32    Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ Aug. 26 2008,18:14) Antievolutionists want to confuse and conflate meaning and information. Spetner, Gitt, Truman, and Dembski... all of them want meaning to be folded within whatever sort of "information" they propose. Shannon's discussion of information explicitly excluded meaning. Algorithmic information theory only cares about one aspect of meaning: what is the shortest program and input that can generate a string? Critique of Dembski's "complex specified information" Well, they are certainly free -- and more power to 'em -- to extend Claude Shannon's seminal work and the field of information theory in general to incorporate mathematically sound concepts of "functional", "complex", and "specified" to go along with "information". Big Claims require Big Proof, though. So far: - Big Claims: many - Big Proof: not so much. I will give them credit for spurring me to tackle Shannon's classic paper. Not my primary speciality (which is radar) but I can occasionally brane when I don't haz the dumb. -------------- "Humans carry plants and animals all over the globe, thus introducing them to places they could never have reached on their own. That certainly increases biodiversity." - D'OL

midwifetoad Posts: 4003 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,22:05    Quote (Richardthughes @ Aug. 26 2008,21:21) Quote (midwifetoad @ Aug. 26 2008,20:54) Actual data, image size 100x100 pixel, White square, and same size square after Photoshop noise filter applied (looks like confetti). Saved with no compression and two kinds of lossless compression.     Object              .bmp      .tif         .psd white, 100x100 px   29.3k     7.83k      8.25k Noise, 100x100 px   29.3k    35.40k     44.60k clearly there's a market for a metaformat that dynamically pics the best compression format - the added carrier cost for the 'format switch' would be minuscule... © 2008 - AtBC Labs Saving the same two files as .gif, the solid white takes 156 bytes and the noise file takes nearly as much space as the lossless compression files. -------------- Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

Richardthughes Posts: 11178 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 26 2008,23:11    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_compression -------------- "Richardthughes, you magnificent bastard, I stand in awe of you..." : Arden Chatfield "You magnificent bastard! " : Louis "ATBC poster child", "I have to agree with Rich.." : DaveTard "I bow to your superior skills" : deadman_932 "...it was Richardthughes making me lie in bed.." : Kristine

J-Dog Posts: 4402 Joined: Dec. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 27 2008,10:20    This post is why I love this site! Well, that and the secrets that Maya reveals.  And the beer and wine and spice tips, and the pictures of Denyse and Dembski.  And the Tardelogues, and Mornington Crescent Death-matches. :) -------------- Come on Tough Guy, do the little dance of ID impotence you do so well. - Louis to Joe G 2/10 Gullibility is not a virtue - Quidam on Dembski's belief in the Bible Code Faith Healers & ID 7/08 UD is an Unnatural Douchemagnet. - richardthughes 7/11

Tracy P. Hamilton Posts: 1239 Joined: May 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Aug. 27 2008,10:27    Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 26 2008,17:39) We should kick back with some beverages. We've already, on this thread, done more actual Information Theory work than the IDiots have done in 15 years. Q: Is there more information in a copy of a message, such as the second copy of steve story's post? A: Yes.  That information is that stevestory had already kicked back with some beverages before posting.     -------------- "Following what I just wrote about fitness, you’re taking refuge in what we see in the world."  PaV "The simple equation F = MA leads to the concept of four-dimensional space." GilDodgen "We have no brain, I don't, for thinking." Robert Byers

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