Towards the Use of Aesthetics in Decision Making: Kolmogorov Complexity Formalizes Birkhoff's Idea

Decision making is traditionally based on utilitarian criteria such as cost e ciency time etc These cri teria are reasonably easy to formalize hence for such criteria we can select the best decision by solving the corresponding well de ned optimization problem In many engineering projects however e g in design ing cars building airplanes etc an important addi tional criterion which needs to be satis ed is that the designed object should be good looking This addi tional criterion is di cult to formalize and because of that it is rarely taken into consideration in formal de cision making In the s the famous mathematician G D Birkho has proposed a formula that described beauty in terms of order and complexity In the simplest cases he formalized these notions and showed that his formula is indeed working However since there was no general notion of complexity he was unable to formalize his idea in the general case In this paper we show that the existing computer based general notion of object complexity called Kolmogorov complexity leads to a reasonable formalization of Birkho s idea and thus leads to a possibility to take aesthetic criteria into con sideration in decision making