Version 1 (April 2026)
Published on Preprints.org: 10.20944/preprints202604.1390.v1
Known Issues & Imprecisions
The following issues have been identified in the current version of the paper based on community feedback (e.g., via Reddit discussions). These will be addressed in the next revision:
- Lack of clear policy for individuating variables in worked examples: The Waymo calculation takes state variables at face value and assigns a fixed 14-bit depth without directly measuring mutual information. While the metric definition is clear that only variables with genuine mutual information count, a rigorous application would measure it directly. The ±order-of-magnitude confidence interval in the paper partly acknowledges this limitation, but the worked examples could be more rigorous in application.
- Definition 3 (R) is not explicit enough about information bottleneck and compression: A naïve "sum over variables" formulation of representational capacity (R) could over-reward fine-grained, low-level descriptions over compressed, higher-level abstractions. While FC intends to outsource this to Bialek et al. (variables only contribute if they participate in prediction), restricting R to predictively relevant information should be stated as a formal constraint in Definition 3, rather than just implied.