Thanks for great theory about understanding programs - I think I'll start using it in practice just today. This is something we all know, but never formulate it accurately.

But still we don't have any definition of what is human perceived complexity of software. I see one candidate - the number of axioms in the program theory. But again when we add requirements we cannot hope to make the number of axioms lesser.

Actually the only way to measure the complexity of design is, for me, by taking the lowest bound of the complexity of programs complying with that design. Adding requirements to the design can only result in a subset of the programs complying with it - thus it can only make the complexity bigger, never lesser. No matter what measure for program complexity we use.

Update: A quote justifying Kolmogorov complexity from the Abstract of On the intelligibility of the universe and the notions of simplicity, complexity and irreducibility by Gregory Chaitin (found via the link you provided):

(...) we defend the thesis that comprehension is compression, i.e., explaining many facts using few theoretical assumptions, and that a theory may be viewed as a computer program for calculating observations. This provides motivation for defining the complexity of something to be the size of the simplest theory for it, in other words, the size of the smallest program for calculating it.

I recommend the whole article (there is some comment on Wolfram works too).

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re^3: Multilevel flexibillity by zby
in thread Multilevel flexibillity by zby

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