The CD complexity of a string x is the length of the shortest polynomial time program which accepts only the string x. The language compression problem consists of giving an upper bound on the CD A n complexity of all strings x in some set A. The best known upper bound for this problem is 2 log(jjA n jj) + O(log(n)), due to Buhrman and Fortnow. We show that the constant factor 2 in this bound is optimal. We also give new bounds for a certain kind of random sets R ` f0; 1g n , for which we show an upper bound of log(jjR n jj) + O(log(n)). 1 Introduction Kolmogorov complexity is a notion that measures the amount of regularity in a finite string. It has turned out to be a very useful tool in theoretical computer science. A simple counting argument showing that for each length there exist random strings, i.e. strings with no regularity, has had many applications (see [LV97]). Early in the history of computational complexity resource bounded notions of Kolmogorov complexity were...

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for their friendship, for many invaluable remarks about the issues discussed in this paper... and for their trial of teaching me the style of work of