The Chaitin Interview II: Defining Randomness
In the 1960s, mathematician and computer scientist Gregory Chaitin published a landmark paper in the field of algorithmic information theory in the Journal of the ACM – and he was only a teenager. Listen in as Robert J. Marks explores that paper with Chaitin, covering Chaitin’s definition of randomness and his philosophical interest in algorithmic information theory.
Show Notes
- 00:27 | Introducing Gregory Chaitin
- 01:12 | Chaitin’s landmark paper published in his teen years
- 02:04 | Chaitin’s definition of randomness
- 08:43 | Metaphysics
- 10:30 | Chaitin’s philosophical interest
- 19:24 | Fermat’s Last Theorem
Additional Resources
- Gregory Chaitin’s Website
- “On the length of programs for computing finite binary sequences,” by Gregory Chaitin, published when he as a teenager. (Journal of the ACM (JACM) 13, no. 4 (1966): 547-569).
- Unravelling Complexity: The Life and Work of Gregory Chaitin, edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria
- Karl Popper
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
- Hermann Weyl
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Leibniz’s Discours de Métaphysique (in English)
- “A Theory of Program Size Formally Identical to Information Theory” by Gregory Chaitin (Journal of the ACM (JACM) 22, no. 3 (1975): 309-440).
- Ray Solomonoff
- Marvin Minsky
- Fermat’s Last Tango on YouTube
(Portions of this transcript have been altered to clarify the content).
