Formally the information distance ${\displaystyle ID(x,y)}$  between ${\displaystyle x}$  and ${\displaystyle y}$  is defined by

${\displaystyle ID(x,y)=\min\{|p|:p(x)=y\;\&\;p(y)=x\},}$ 

with ${\displaystyle p}$  a finite binary program for the fixed universal computer with as inputs finite binary strings ${\displaystyle x,y}$ . In ^[4] it is proven that ${\displaystyle ID(x,y)=E(x,y)+O(\log \cdot \max\{K(x\mid y),K(y\mid x)\})}$  with

${\displaystyle E(x,y)=\max\{K(x\mid y),K(y\mid x)\},}$ 

where ${\displaystyle K(\cdot \mid \cdot )}$  is the Kolmogorov complexity defined by ^[1] of the prefix type.^[5] This ${\displaystyle E(x,y)}$  is the important quantity.

Universality edit

Let ${\displaystyle \Delta }$  be the class of upper semicomputable distances ${\displaystyle D(x,y)}$  that satisfy the density condition

${\displaystyle \sum _{x:x\neq y}2^{-D(x,y)}\leq 1,\;\sum _{y:y\neq x}2^{-D(x,y)}\leq 1,}$ 

This excludes irrelevant distances such as ${\displaystyle D(x,y)={\frac {1}{2}}}$  for ${\displaystyle x\neq y}$ ; it takes care that if the distance growth then the number of objects within that distance of a given object grows. If ${\displaystyle D\in \Delta }$  then ${\displaystyle E(x,y)\leq D(x,y)}$  up to a constant additive term.^[4] The probabilistic expressions of the distance is the first cohomological class in information symmetric cohomology,^[6] which may be conceived as a universality property.

Metricity edit

The distance ${\displaystyle E(x,y)}$  is a metric up to an additive ${\displaystyle O(\log .\max\{K(x\mid y),K(y\mid x)\})}$  term in the metric (in)equalities.^[4] The probabilistic version of the metric is indeed unique has shown by Han in 1981.^[7]

Maximum overlap edit

If ${\displaystyle E(x,y)=K(x\mid y)}$ , then there is a program ${\displaystyle p}$  of length ${\displaystyle K(x\mid y)}$  that converts ${\displaystyle y}$  to ${\displaystyle x}$ , and a program ${\displaystyle q}$  of length ${\displaystyle K(y\mid x)-K(x\mid y)}$  such that the program ${\displaystyle qp}$  converts ${\displaystyle x}$  to ${\displaystyle y}$ . (The programs are of the self-delimiting format which means that one can decide where one program ends and the other begins in concatenation of the programs.) That is, the shortest programs to convert between two objects can be made maximally overlapping: For ${\displaystyle K(x\mid y)\leq K(y\mid x)}$  it can be divided into a program that converts object ${\displaystyle x}$  to object ${\displaystyle y}$ , and another program which concatenated with the first converts ${\displaystyle y}$  to ${\displaystyle x}$  while the concatenation of these two programs is a shortest program to convert between these objects.^[4]

Minimum overlap edit

The programs to convert between objects ${\displaystyle x}$  and ${\displaystyle y}$  can also be made minimal overlapping. There exists a program ${\displaystyle p}$  of length ${\displaystyle K(x\mid y)}$  up to an additive term of ${\displaystyle O(\log(\max\{K(x\mid y),K(y\mid x)\}))}$  that maps ${\displaystyle y}$  to ${\displaystyle x}$  and has small complexity when ${\displaystyle x}$  is known (${\displaystyle K(p\mid x)\approx 0}$ ). Interchanging the two objects we have the other program^[8] Having in mind the parallelism between Shannon information theory and Kolmogorov complexity theory, one can say that this result is parallel to the Slepian-Wolf and Körner–Imre Csiszár–Marton theorems.

Theoretical edit

The result of An.A. Muchnik on minimum overlap above is an important theoretical application showing that certain codes exist: to go to finite target object from any object there is a program which almost only depends on the target object! This result is fairly precise and the error term cannot be significantly improved.^[9] Information distance was material in the textbook,^[10] it occurs in the Encyclopedia on Distances.^[11]

Practical edit

To determine the similarity of objects such as genomes, languages, music, internet attacks and worms, software programs, and so on, information distance is normalized and the Kolmogorov complexity terms approximated by real-world compressors (the Kolmogorov complexity is a lower bound to the length in bits of a compressed version of the object). The result is the normalized compression distance (NCD) between the objects. This pertains to objects given as computer files like the genome of a mouse or text of a book. If the objects are just given by name such as `Einstein' or `table' or the name of a book or the name `mouse', compression does not make sense. We need outside information about what the name means. Using a data base (such as the internet) and a means to search the database (such as a search engine like Google) provides this information. Every search engine on a data base that provides aggregate page counts can be used in the normalized Google distance (NGD). A python package for computing all information distances and volumes, multivariate mutual information, conditional mutual information, joint entropies, total correlations, in a dataset of n variables is available .^[12]

• Arkhangel'skii, A. V.; Pontryagin, L. S. (1990), General Topology I: Basic Concepts and Constructions Dimension Theory, Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences, Springer, ISBN 3-540-18178-4