On order and complexity. II. Application to chemical and biochemical structures.

Abstract The organized complexity of a variety of chemical and biochemical compounds is estimated by the method outlined in the first paper of this series. The structural formulas of these compounds are treated as labelled graphs, the labels of the vertices being the different kinds of atoms, and those of the edges being the different kinds of bonds. Such a graph is coded for by a linear sequence of symbols which in turn is described as short as possible by means of additional symbols. The length of the shortest possible description of a structural formula obtained in that way is taken as a measure for the organized complexity of the underlying compound. Upper limits for the organized complexities of protein and RNA molecules are also estimated.