Paper detail

A superstatistical formulation of complexity measures

It is discussed how the superstatistical formulation of effective Boltzmann factors can be related to the concept of Kolmogorov complexity, generating an infinite set of complexity measures (CMs) for quantifying information. At this level, the information is treated according to its background, which means that the CM depends on the inherent attributes of the information scenario. While the basic Boltzmann factor directly produces the standard complexity measure (SCM), it succeeds in the description of large-scale scenarios where the data components are not interrelated with themselves, thus adopting the behaviour of a gas. What happens in scenarios in which the presence of sources and sinks of information cannot be neglected, needs of a CM other than the one produced by the ordinary Boltzmann factor. We introduce a set of flexible CMs, without free parameters, that converge asymptotically to the Kolmogorov complexity, but also quantify the information in scenarios with a reasonable small density of states. We prove that these CMs are obtained from a generalised relative entropy and we suggest why such measures are the only compatible generalisations of the SCM.