A measure of “complexity” is proposed, based on appropriately defined notions of “order” and “disorder,” which has a considerable degree of flexibility in its dependence on these concepts. The possible functional dependencies which result encompass those of many earlier definitions of complexity. The proposed measure is in principle easy to calculate and has the property of an intensive thermodynamic quantity. With appropriate choices of parameters it behaves similarly to “effective measure complexity” for the logistic map. It is also a generalization of the “normalized complexity” of López-Ruiz et al., but does not suffer from “over-universality.”

• Received 29 July 1998

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.59.1459