Complexity of the universe
Bennet complexity explained
Charles Bennet came up with an idea of complexity which is worthy of notice. The idea is that the complexity of a system is directly related to the time the system has been in existence. There is a linear correspondence.
Charles Bennet works at the IBM research lab doing interesting speculative work.
The complexity of the universe is equal to the time it has been around according to this metric. This makes the most sense if you consider the universe to be deterministically unfolding. The very early universe then would be less complex by definition. It is early, so it is less complex, regardless of its physical appearance.
The apparent physical manifestation of changing complexity can be attributed to two factors:
1. It has to do with our own limited perceptual ability. (we can not percieve its earlier complexity, for it was hidden within submolecular motion).
2. The complexity changes come from deterministic unraveling.
An easy way to understand this is to watch a computer program print out the digits for pi. As time goes by, more and more digits come out .. 3.1415926 and it is apparently very complex. It seems to get more complex and interesting as time goes by, for more digits are appearing. This is a purely deterministic process, and as time goes by the complexity changes.
One problem with this is that our apparent universe is not a deterministic one. Otherwise this would be a wonderful measure of complexity. And it captures an important idea: form can arise from deterministic unravelling. The morphology of an organism arises from its genetic code. However, according the universe complexity measure this type of deterministic unraveling, which is important for macroscopic processes, does not create information or complexity. According to Bennet measure, it does.
To the universe complexity page