Reference normalizations of Effort-To-Compress across length, alphabet size, and composition
Comparing finite symbolic complexity requires an explicit reference. Effort-To-Compress (ETC) counts the recursive pair substitutions needed to reduce a symbolic sequence to a constant. Its conventional normalization with L - 1 leaves systematic dependence on sequence length L and alphabet size k, confounding comparisons across datasets. We derive certified lower bounds for ETC and show that, for…
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