10.4230/LIPICS.STACS.2011.452
Bienvenu, Laurent
Laurent
Bienvenu
Merkle, Wolfgang
Wolfgang
Merkle
Nies, Andre
Andre
Nies
Solovay functions and K-triviality
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
2011
Algorithmic randomness
Kolmogorov complexity
K-triviality
Schwentick, Thomas
Thomas
Schwentick
Dürr, Christoph
Christoph
Dürr
2011
2011-03-11
2011-03-11
2011-03-11
en
urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-30345
10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2011
978-3-939897-25-5
1868-8969
10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2011
LIPIcs, Volume 9, STACS 2011
28th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2011)
2013
9
38
452
463
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
Schwentick, Thomas
Thomas
Schwentick
Dürr, Christoph
Christoph
Dürr
1868-8969
Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
2011
9
Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
12 pages
634248 bytes
application/pdf
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
As part of his groundbreaking work on algorithmic randomness, Solovay demonstrated in the 1970s the remarkable fact that there are computable upper bounds of prefix-free Kolmogorov complexity $K$ that are tight on infinitely many values (up to an additive constant). Such computable upper bounds are called Solovay functions. Recent work of Bienvenu and Downey~[STACS 2009, LIPIcs 3, pp 147-158] indicates that Solovay functions are deeply connected with central concepts of algorithmic randomness such as $Omega$ numbers, K-triviality, and Martin-Loef randomness.
In what follows, among other results we answer two open problems posed by Bienvenu and Downey about the definition of $K$-triviality and about the Gacs-Miller-Yu characterization of Martin-Loef randomness. The former defines a sequence A to be K-trivial if K(A|n) <=^+ K(n), the latter asserts that a sequence A is Martin-Loef random iff C(A|n) >=^+ n-K(n). So both involve the noncomputable function K. As our main results we show that in both cases K(n) can be equivalently replaced by any Solovay function, and, what is more, that among all computable functions such a replacement is possible exactly for the Solovay functions. Moreover, similar statements hold for the larger class of all right-c.e. in place of the computable functions. These full characterizations, besides having significant theoretical interest on their own, will be useful as tools when working with K-trivial and Martin-Loef random sequences.
LIPIcs, Vol. 9, 28th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2011), pages 452-463