Comparing 2 similar strings?

[Oleg Paraschenko]

Hello,

Scott David Daniels <Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org> wrote in message
news:<428c0d21$1 at nntp0.pdx.net>...
> William Park wrote:
> > How do you compare 2 strings, and determine how much they are "close" to
> > each other?  
> 
> Here's a really weird idea:  Measure the size difference between the
> pair of strings compressed together and compressed separately.
> 
  The idea isn't weird. The only problem is that naive approach
failed. compress(a,b) != compress(b,a). Having an assumption
that compressing is a good approximation for the Kolmogorov
complexity, the correct formula is a bit more complicated.

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