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Cited by 2,717

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On the Complexity of Finite Sequences

Lempel, A., Ziv, J.·1976·IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Abstract

A new approach to the problem of evaluating the complexity ("randomness") of finite sequences is presented. The proposed complexity measure is related to the number of steps in a self-delimiting production process by which a given sequence is presumed to be generated. It is further related to the number of distinct substrings and the rate of their occurrence along the sequence. The derived properties of the proposed measure are discussed and motivated in conjunction with other well-established complexity criteria.

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Metadata

Authors
Lempel, A., & Ziv, J.
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Published
1976-01
Volume
22
Issue
1
Pages
75-81
ISSN
  • 0018-9448 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-9654
OpenAlex
W2077770566
Cited by
2,717
References
0
FWCI
4.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: On the Complexity of Finite Sequences. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tit.1976.1055501
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Lempel, A., & Ziv, J. (1976). On the Complexity of Finite Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. https://doi.org/10.1109/tit.1976.1055501

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.