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There were a few points that I, as someone unfamiliar with many of the ideas presented, got hung up on.

First, the paragraph that begins with "At first blush, the requirement to use..." Seems to be a non sequitur. I don't fully understand how the previous section creates a requirement to use deterministic programs, so I could use more explanation on how that requirement is established.

Second, a very simple concrete example of what one of these programs would look like would be immensely helpful. After re-reading the article a bit I have a mental image of a program that contains a long, compressed string and a decompression algorithm that somehow models the system you're interested in. I can imagine how you might get a useful interpretation of probability from the decompression system, but there are enough open questions there that I'm not sure I have the correct interpretation.

Hope that helps!



Thanks. I should clarify that the computer is deterministic, so as to avoid building randomness into the definition of randomness!

I skimmed over an example too quickly, but your intuition is about right. For that sequence, two possible programs are:

- Compute and print the first 40 digits of pi.

- Decompress the following string according to a Shannon code with probabilities (1/36,1/18,1/12,[etc]): [insert code]




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