Complexity and Information A Critical Evaluation of Algorithmic Information Theory

Complexity is a catchword of certain extremely popular and rapidly devel oping interdisciplinary new sciences often called accordingly the sciences of complexity It is often closely associated with another notably popular but ambiguous word information information in turn may be justly called the central new concept in the whole th century science Moreover the notion of information is regularly coupled with a key concept of thermody namics viz entropy And like this was not enough it is quite usual to add one more at present extraordinarily popular notion namely chaos and wed it with the abovementioned concepts It is my aim in this paper to critically analyse this conceptual mess from a logical and philosophical point of view concentrating on the concepts of complexity and information and the question concerning the true relation between them I shall focus especially on the socalled algorithmic infor mation theory which has lately become extraordinarily popular especially in theoretical computer science and in the abovementioned new sciences of complexity indeed today one can hardly open a popular science book with out meeting this theory It is notable that this approach simply equates in formation content with complexity and it is furthermore regularly oered as the preferable explication of the notions of entropy and chao