Assembly Theory was perhaps “too good to be true” from the outset. The grand claims for what it could accomplish didn’t help either. The problem from my own point of view is that statistical inference based on data compression simply doesn’t work very well.
I haven’t read these papers yet, but what I gather from this overview is that standard methods based on Shannon Entropy and the entropy of compressed information already do what the Assembly Index is claimed to do.
Well I am glad to learn of that. All of this is above my pay grade, but to me that Assembly Theory paper really seemed like a pile of … I had better not say.
Well the grand claims made about Assembly Theory were a steaming pile of betternotsaid, but the nitty-gritty of how it works is kind of interesting. As it turns out, interesting enough that someone else thought of it first.