Very Simple Chaitin Machines for Concrete AIT

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Stay, Michael

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: In 1975, Chaitin introduced his celebrated Omega number, the halting probability of a universal Chaitin machine, a universal Turing machine with a prefix-free domain. The Omega number's bits are algorithmically random–there is no reason the bits should be the way they are, if we define "reason" to be a computable explanation smaller than the data itself. Since that time, only two explicit universal Chaitin machines have been proposed, both by Chaitin himself. Concrete algorithmic information theory involves the study of particular universal Turing machines, about which one can state theorems with specific numerical bounds, rather than include terms like O(1). We present several new tiny Chaitin machines (those with a prefix-free domain) suitable for the study of concrete algorithmic information theory. One of the machines, which we call Keraia, is a binary encoding of lambda calculus based on a curried lambda operator. Source code is included in the appendices. We also give an algorithm for restricting the domain of blank-endmarker machines to a prefix-free domain over an alphabet that does not include the endmarker; this allows one to take many universal Turing machines and construct universal Chaitin machines from them.

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 231-247, 2005