Following is an example of a C program which prints itself (on a side-note the trick behind the construction is to use the ASCII values for quotes and newlines). Clearly the Kolmogorov complexity of each w is less than or equal to the length of w -- given that we have constructed a program of length same as the string w.
I'm wondering if this is indeed optimal ? -- that is given a w, if its possible to produce a program to generate w and size strictly less than |w|.
char qt=34; char nl=10; char *str="char qt=34;%cchar nl=10;%cchar *str=%c%s%c;%cint main() {%c printf(str,nl,nl,qt,str,qt,nl,nl,nl,nl);%c}%c"; int main() { printf(str,nl,nl,qt,str,qt,nl,nl,nl,nl); }
BTW, compile the program with
gcc -wto suppress warnings about header inclusion.