Extracting information is hard: A Turing degree of non-integral effective Hausdorff dimension

Abstract

We construct a Δ20 infinite binary sequence with effective Hausdorff dimension 1/2 that does not compute a sequence of higher dimension. Introduced by Lutz, effective Hausdorff dimension can be viewed as a measure of the information density of a sequence. In particular, the dimension of A∈2ω is the lim inf of the ratio between the information content and length of initial segments of A. Thus the main result demonstrates that it is not always possible to extract information from a partially random source to produce a sequence that has higher information density. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.