Content about “complexity”

Quantum particles that are both light and matter help solve infamous NP hard problems.

The simple act of packing your luggage can open a complex can of worms.

How fast can you tell whether two networks are the same?

A famous question involving networks appears to have come closer to an answer.

What will quantum computers be able to do that ordinary computers can't do?

Kolmogorov complexity gives a high value to strings of symbols that are essentially random. But isn't randomness essentially meaningless? Should a measure of information assign a low value to it? The concept of sophistication addresses this question.

There are many ways of saying the same thing — you can use many words, or few. Perhaps information should be measured in terms of the shortest way of expressing it? In the 1960s this idea led to a measure of information called Kolmogorov complexity.

Can you measure information? It's a tricky question — but people have tried and come up with very interesting ideas.

On the face of it the Universe is a fairly complex place. But could mathematics ultimately lead to a simple description of it? In fact, should simplicity be a defining feature of a "theory of everything"? We ponder the answers.

In this, the second part of this series, we look at a mathematical notion of complexity and wonder whether the Universe is just too complex for our tiny little minds to understand.