RANDOMNESS: 5 QUESTIONS
Hector Zenil (U. of Paris 1 (IHPST) / U. of Lille 1 (LIFL)), Editor.
Automatic Press / VIP.

Contributors:

Eric Allender
Cristian Calude
Gregory Chaitin
Rodney G. Downey
Peter Gacs
Ronald Graham
Marcus Hutter
Antonin Kucera
Ming Li
Giuseppe Longo
Jack Lutz
Joe Miller
André Nies
Andrew L. Rukhin
Juergen Schmidhuber
Ray Solomonoff
Ludwig Staiger
Michael Stay
Karl Svozil
Tommaso Toffoli
Osamu Watanabe
Stephen Wolfram

Overview

"Randomness: 5 Questions" is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential scholars in the field. It is a compilation of the views and experiences of some of the visionary pioneers and thinkers in this broad, fundamental and foundational area of intellectual and philosophical inquiry.

The five questions include (but are not necessarily limited to) the following:

• Why were you initially drawn to the study of computation and randomness?
• What have we learned?
• What don't we know (yet)?
• What are the most important open problems in the field?
• What are the prospects for progress?

The intended audience is that part of the general public interested in science and the philosophy of science, and students and other colleagues in the broader fields of computer science, mathematics and physics.

The topics that may be covered, include (without being necessarily limited to) the following:

• Mathematical approaches to randomness.
• Compatibility between the definitions: divergence/convergence.
• The basic theorems, their importance and chain of dependency.
• The question of the dependency or independence of additive constants related to the stability of the definitions.
• The apparent contingency of non-deterministic randomness from quantum mechanics.
• Classical deterministic chaos as a source of deterministic randomness.
• The limits of knowledge and understanding: lack of information, undecidability, irreducibility, non-computability, non-tractability as properties of randomness.
• Computing randomness and its applications (Minimum Message Length, Decision theory, Bayesian networks).
• The question of deterministic randomness
• Irreducibility and unpredictability.
• The universal prior distribution and its applications.
• Program-size complexity and computation as information processing.
• Resource-bounded complexity and physical constraints.
• Global vs. local randomness: finite strings vs. infinite sequences.
• Compressibility and comprehensibility (or meaning).
• Physical, statistical and quantum randomness.
• The relation to other computational complexity measures and possible tradeoffs (e.g. space/time-complexity).
• Natural processes as sources of randomness.
• (pseudo-)Random Number Generators (RNGs).
• Statistical tests for randomness.

Contributions must not have been previously published nor should they be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Contributions in LaTeX, PDF or MSWord format should be submitted by e-mail to Hector Zenil (e-mail: hector.zenil-chavez[at]malix.univ-paris1.fr with cc. to hector.zenil[at]lifl.fr or hectorz[at]alumni.cmu.edu) by the end of the due date. We expect the typical interview to take up 6 to 8 pages, but individual respondents are free to determine the precise length of their contributions. 

For more information, please contact the Editor.

Important Dates

Deadline for Accepting Invitation: By the end of February, 2009
Manuscript Submission Deadline: August 31st., 2009
Expected Publication Date: 2010

Other titles published as part of the 5 Questions Series by Automatic Press / VIP:

Game Theory: 5 Questions.
Philosophy of Mathematics: 5 Questions.
Complexity: 5 Questions.
Philosophy of Physics: 5 Questions