Prelim Workshop Lecture Notes

Prelim Workshop Lecture Notes

Logical Environments

In Logical Frameworks, Huet and Plotkin gathered contributions from the first International Workshop on Logical Frameworks. This volume has grown from the second workshop, and as before the contributions are of the highest calibre. Four main themes are covered: the general problem of representing formal systems in logical frameworks, basic algorithms of general use in proof assistants, logical issues, and large-scale experiments with proof assistants.

Kolmogorov Complexity and Algorithmic Randomness

Looking at a sequence of zeros and ones, we often feel that it is not random, that is, it is not plausible as an outcome of fair coin tossing. Why? The answer is provided by algorithmic information theory: because the sequence is compressible, that is, it has small complexity or, equivalently, can be produced by a short program. This idea, going back to Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, Chaitin, Levin, and others, is now the starting point of algorithmic information theory. The first part of this book is a textbook-style exposition of the basic notions of complexity and randomness; the second part covers some recent work done by participants of the “Kolmogorov seminar” in Moscow (started by Kolmogorov himself in the 1980s) and their colleagues. This book contains numerous exercises (embedded in the text) that will help readers to grasp the material.