Serial Pattern Complexity: Irregularity + Hierarchy

摘要

In perception research, various models have been designed for the encoding ofe.g. visual patterns, in order to predict the human interpretation of such patterns. Each of these encoding models provides a few coding rules to obtain codes of a pattern, each code expressing regularity and hierarchy in that pattern. Some of these models employ the minimum principle which states that the human interpretation of a pattern is reflected by the simplest code of that pattern. That is, the simplest code according to a given complexity metric. The authors propose a new complexity metric. The metric is based on a formal analysis of the concept of regularity. Some conclusions of the analysis are sketched. The new metric accounts for the amounts of irregularity and hierarchy as represented in a code of a pattern, such that these two amounts can be added to determine the complexity of a code.