You are correct to be bugged IMO, I agree with you. My thoughts: https://forwardscattering.org/page/Kolmogorov%20complexity
Kolmogorov complexity is useless as an objective measure of complexity.
Kolmogorov complexity is useless as an objective measure of complexity.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Kolmogorov complexity is useless as an objective complexity measure however. The invariance theorem does provide a truly universal and absolute measure of algorithmic complexity — but it’s the complexity between two things rather than of one thing. You can think of U and V as “representatives” of any two partial recursive functions u(x) and v(x) capable of universal computation. The constant c(u, v) is interesting then because it is a natural number that depends only on the two abstract functions themselves and not the specific Turing machines that compute the functions.
What does that mean philosophically? I’m not sure. It might mean that the notion of absolute complexity for a finite string isn’t a coherent concept, i.e., complexity is fundamentally a property of the relationship between things rather than of a thing.
lim n->\infty K(X|n)/n
Possible solutions that come tom mind:
1) UTMs are actually too powerful, and we should use a finitary abstraction to have a more sensible measure of complexity for finite strings.
2) We might need to define a kind of "relativity of complexity". This is my preferred approach and something I've thought about to some degree. That is, that we want a way of describing the complexity of something relative to our computational resources.