I think formally, the Kolmogorov complexity would have to be stated as the length of a description of a Turing Machine (not that this gets completely rid of any wiggle room).
Of course, TMs do not offer a great gaming experience.
“The operating system and the hardware” is certainly an upper bound, but also quite certainly to be overkill.
Your floating point unit or your network stack are not going to be very busy while you play tetris.
If you cut it down to the essentials (getting rid of things like scores which have to displayed as characters, or background graphics or music), you have a 2d grid in which you need to toggle fields, which is isomorphic to a matrix display. I don’t think that having access to boost or JCL or the python ecosystem is going to help you much in terms of writing a shorter program than you would need for a bit serial processor. And these things can be crazy small—this one takes about 200 LUTs and FFs. If we can agree that an universal logic gate is a reasonable primitive which would be understandable to any technological civilization , then we are talking on the order of 1k or 2k logic gates here. Specifying that on a circuit diagram level is not going to set you back by more than 10kB.
So while you are technically correct that there is some overhead, I think directionally Malmesbury is correct in that the binary file makes for a reasonable estimate of the information content, while adding the size of the OS (sometimes multiple floppy disks, these days!) will lead to a much worse estimate.
Sorry but you said Tetris, not some imaginary minimal thing that you now want to call Tetris but is actually only the base object model with no input or output. You can’t just eliminate the graphics processing complexity because Tetris isn’t very graphics intensive—It is just as complex to describe a GPU that processes 10 triangles in a month as one that processes 1 billion in a nanosecond.
As an aside, the complexity of most things that we think of as simple these days is dominated by the complexity of their input and output—I’m particularly thinking of the IoT and all those smart modules in your car and smart lightbulbs where the communications stack is orders of magnitude larger than the “core” function. You can’t just ignore that stuff. A smart lightbulb without WiFi,Ethernet,TCP/IP etc, is not a lightbulb.
I think formally, the Kolmogorov complexity would have to be stated as the length of a description of a Turing Machine (not that this gets completely rid of any wiggle room).
Of course, TMs do not offer a great gaming experience.
“The operating system and the hardware” is certainly an upper bound, but also quite certainly to be overkill.
Your floating point unit or your network stack are not going to be very busy while you play tetris.
If you cut it down to the essentials (getting rid of things like scores which have to displayed as characters, or background graphics or music), you have a 2d grid in which you need to toggle fields, which is isomorphic to a matrix display. I don’t think that having access to boost or JCL or the python ecosystem is going to help you much in terms of writing a shorter program than you would need for a bit serial processor. And these things can be crazy small—this one takes about 200 LUTs and FFs. If we can agree that an universal logic gate is a reasonable primitive which would be understandable to any technological civilization , then we are talking on the order of 1k or 2k logic gates here. Specifying that on a circuit diagram level is not going to set you back by more than 10kB.
So while you are technically correct that there is some overhead, I think directionally Malmesbury is correct in that the binary file makes for a reasonable estimate of the information content, while adding the size of the OS (sometimes multiple floppy disks, these days!) will lead to a much worse estimate.
Sorry but you said Tetris, not some imaginary minimal thing that you now want to call Tetris but is actually only the base object model with no input or output. You can’t just eliminate the graphics processing complexity because Tetris isn’t very graphics intensive—It is just as complex to describe a GPU that processes 10 triangles in a month as one that processes 1 billion in a nanosecond.
As an aside, the complexity of most things that we think of as simple these days is dominated by the complexity of their input and output—I’m particularly thinking of the IoT and all those smart modules in your car and smart lightbulbs where the communications stack is orders of magnitude larger than the “core” function. You can’t just ignore that stuff. A smart lightbulb without WiFi,Ethernet,TCP/IP etc, is not a lightbulb.