Leibniz as a precursor to Chaitin’s Algorithmic Information Theory 1

Gregory Chaitin, one of the founders of Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT), traces some of the key components of the idea of digital information back to the ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646‒1716), among them the idea of a computer program, an information-theoretic notion of complexity, and the idea of irreducibility. This chapter consists in a critical examination of these claims of anticipation. It is argued that Leibniz anticipates …