Programming Logic: Finding the smallest equation to a large number

Question

I do not know a whole lot about math, so I don\'t know how to begin to google what I am looking for, so I rely on the intelligence of experts to help me understand what I am

Answer 1

Just to throw another keyword in your Google hopper, see Kolmogorov Complexity. The Kolmogorov complexity of a string is the size of the smallest Turing machine that outputs the string, given an empty input. This is one way to formalize what you seem to be after. However, calculating the Kolmogorov complexity of a given string is known to be an undecidable problem :)

Hope this helps,

TJ

Answer 2

There's a good program to do that here: http://mrob.com/pub/ries/index.html