Novelty, Information and Surprise of Repertoires

This chapter finally contains the definition of novelty, information and surprise for arbitrary covers and in particular for repertoires and some methods for their practical calculation. We give the broadest possible definitions of these terms for arbitrary covers, because we use it occasionally in Part VI. Practically it would be sufficient to define everything just for repertoires. It turns out that the theories of novelty and of information on repertoires are both proper extensions of classical information theory (where complementary theorems hold), which coincide with each other and with classical information theory, when the repertoires are partitions.