Complexity, Universal Libraries, dna Sequences

Abstract

Complexity studies are burgeoning into an ever-increasing number of fields. This paper seeks to abstract from a large number of non-biological complexity areas some exemplar common thread representative of many complexity areas. One such common thread is identified, a thread leading immediately to the notion of Universal Library, as an additional complexity area, containing all possible texts and, correspondingly, encompassing all possible knowledge (amidst, naturally, a welter of partially and wholly senseless texts). This notion is then wedded to an elementary portion of number theory, to indicate where replicas of universal libraries exist and with what certain attributes. Next, a representative example of a biological complexity area—DNA sequences—is introduced. While DNA is often casually termed a library specifying the heritability machinery of individuals and species, this paper briefly explores whether explicit relations exist between DNA sequences and universal libraries, to help test, inter alia, the strength of the initially identified complexity thread to link non-biological and biological complexity areas. This theme of common linking threads has many interesting open research issues.