George Montanez
George Montañez: Specified complexity, design, and surprise
Digging further into George Montañez’s new paper at BIO-Complexity, a lay-friendly version: Specified complexity allows us to measure how surprising random outcomes are, in reference to some probabilistic model. But there are other ways of measuring surprise. In Shannon’s celebrated information theory (Shannon 1948), improbability alone can be used to measure the surprise of observing a particular random outcome, using the quantity of surprisal, which is simply the negative logarithm (base 2) of the probability of observing the outcome, namely, -log2p(x) where x is the observed outcome and p(x) is the probability of observing it under some distribution p. Unlikely outcomes generate large surprisal values, since they are in some sense unexpected. But let us consider a case where all Read More ›