This book is an essential companion to Chaitin's monograph Algorithmic Information Theory and includes in easily accessible form all the main ideas of the creator and principal architect of algorithmic information theory. This expanded second edition has added thirteen abstracs, a 1988 Scientific American article, a transcript of a Europalia 89 lecturer, an essay on biology, and an extensive bibliography. Its large format makes it easier to read. Chaitin's ideas are a fundamentals extension of those of Godel and Turing and have exploded some basic assumptions of mathematics and thrown new light on the scientific method, epistemology, probability theory, and of course computer science and information theory.//yeni