The book is a collection of papers written by a selection of eminent authors from around the world in honour of Gregory Chaitin''s 60th birthday. This is a unique volume including technical contributions, philosophical papers and essays. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers (902 KB). Contents: On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers (C H Bennett); The Implications of a Cosmological Information Bound for Complexity, Quantum Information and the Nature of Physical Law (P C W Davies); What is a Computation? (M Davis); A Berry-Type Paradox (G Lolli); The Secret Number. An Exposition of Chaitin''s Theory (G Rozenberg & A Salomaa); Omega and the Time Evolution of the n-Body Problem (K Svozil); God''s Number: Where Can We Find the Secret of the Universe? In a Single Number! (M Chown); Omega Numbers (J-P Delahaye); Some Modern Perspectives on the Quest for Ultimate Knowledge (S Wolfram); An Enquiry Concerning Human (and Computer!) [Mathematical] Understanding (D Zeilberger); and other papers. Readership: Computer scientists and philosophers, both in academia and industry.

Dr Gregory Chaitin, one of the world's leading mathematicians, is best known for his discovery of the remarkable ê number, a concrete example of irreducible complexity in pure mathematics which shows that mathematics is infinitely complex. In this volume, Chaitin discusses the evolution of these ideas, tracing them back to Leibniz and Borel as well as G”del and Turing.This book contains 23 non-technical papers by Chaitin, his favorite tutorial and survey papers, including Chaitin's three Scientific American articles. These essays summarize a lifetime effort to use the notion of program-size complexity or algorithmic information content in order to shed further light on the fundamental work of G”del and Turing on the limits of mathematical methods, both in logic and in computation. Chaitin argues here that his information-theoretic approach to metamathematics suggests a quasi-empirical view of mathematics that emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences between mathematics and physics. He also develops his own brand of digital philosophy, which views the entire universe as a giant computation, and speculates that perhaps everything is discrete software, everything is 0's and 1's.Chaitin's fundamental mathematical work will be of interest to philosophers concerned with the limits of knowledge and to physicists interested in the nature of complexity.

The revolutions that Gregory Chaitin brought within the fields of science are well known. From his discovery of algorithmic information complexity to his work on Gödel's theorem, he has contributed deeply and expansively to such diverse fields.This book attempts to bring together a collection of articles written by his colleagues, collaborators and friends to celebrate his work in a festschrift. It encompasses various aspects of the scientific work that Chaitin has accomplished over the years. Topics range from philosophy to biology, from foundations of mathematics to physics, from logic to computer science, and all other areas Chaitin has worked on.It also includes sketches of his personality with the help of biographical accounts in some unconventional articles that will provide a rare glimpse into the personal life and nature of Chaitin.Compared to the other books that exist along a similar vein, this book stands out primarily due to its highly interdisciplinary nature and its scope that will attract readers into Chaitin's world.

The revolutions that Gregory Chaitin brought within the fields of science are well known. From his discovery of algorithmic information complexity to his work on Gödel's theorem, he has contributed deeply and expansively to such diverse fields. This book attempts to bring together a collection of articles written by his colleagues, collaborators and friends to celebrate his work in a festschrift. It encompasses various aspects of the scientific work that Chaitin has accomplished over the years. Topics range from philosophy to biology, from foundations of mathematics to physics, from logic to computer science, and all other areas Chaitin has worked on. It also includes sketches of his personality with the help of biographical accounts in some unconventional articles that will provide a rare glimpse into the personal life and nature of Chaitin. Compared to the other books that exist along a similar vein, this book stands out primarily due to its highly interdisciplinary nature and its scope that will attract readers into Chaitin's world

Arturo Carsetti According to molecular Biology, true invariance (life) can exist only within the framework of ongoing autonomous morphogenesis and vice versa. With respect to this secret dialectics, life and cognition appear as indissolubly interlinked. In this sense, for instance, the inner articulation of conceptual spaces appears to be linked to an inner functional development based on a continuous activity of selection and “anchorage” realised on semantic grounds. It is the work of “invention” and g- eration (in invariance), linked with the “rooting” of meaning, which determines the evolution, the leaps and punctuated equilibria, the conditions related to the unfo- ing of new modalities of invariance, an invariance which is never simple repetition and which springs on each occasion through deep-level processes of renewal and recovery. The selection perpetrated by meaning reveals its autonomy aboveall in its underpinning, in an objective way, the ongoing choice of these new modalities. As such it is not, then, concerned only with the game of “possibles”, offering itself as a simple channel for pure chance, but with providing a channel for the articulation of the “ le” in the humus of a semantic (and embodied) net in order to prepare the necessary conditionsfor a continuousrenewal and recoveryof original creativity. In effect, it is this autonomy in inventing new possible modules of incompressibility whichdeterminestheactualemergenceofnew(andtrue)creativity,whichalsotakes place through the “narration” of the effected construction.

Nonlinearity, Complexity and Randomness in Economics presents a variety of papers by leading economists, scientists, and philosophers who focus on different aspects of nonlinearity, complexity and randomness, and their implications for economics. A theme of the book is that economics should be based on algorithmic, computable mathematical foundations. Features an interdisciplinary collection of papers by economists, scientists, and philosophers Presents new approaches to macroeconomic modelling, agent-based modelling, financial markets, and emergent complexity Reveals how economics today must be based on algorithmic, computable mathematical foundations