,
Frank Stephan
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We study algorithmic randomness properties for probability measures on Cantor space. We say that a measure μ on the space of infinite bit sequences is Martin-Löf absolutely continuous if the non-Martin-Löf random bit sequences form a null set with respect to μ. We think of this as a weak randomness notion for measures. We begin with examples, and a robustness property related to Solovay tests. Our main work connects our property to the growth of the initial segment complexity for measures μ; the latter is defined as a μ-average over the complexity of strings of the same length. We show that a maximal growth implies our weak randomness property, but also that both implications of the Levin-Schnorr theorem fail. We briefly discuss K-triviality for measures, which means that the growth of initial segment complexity is as slow as possible. We show that full Martin-Löf randomness of a measure implies Martin-Löf absolute continuity; the converse fails because only the latter property is compatible with having atoms. In a final section we consider weak randomness relative to a general ergodic computable measure. We seek appropriate effective versions of the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theorem and the Brudno theorem where the bit sequences are replaced by measures.
@InProceedings{nies_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2020.55,
author = {Nies, Andr\'{e} and Stephan, Frank},
title = {{Randomness and Initial Segment Complexity for Probability Measures}},
booktitle = {37th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2020)},
pages = {55:1--55:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-140-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {154},
editor = {Paul, Christophe and Bl\"{a}ser, Markus},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2020.55},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-119168},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2020.55},
annote = {Keywords: algorithmic randomness, probability measure on Cantor space, Kolmogorov complexity, statistical superposition, quantum states}
}