Multiplicative Turing Ensembles, Pareto's Law, and Creativity

Abstract

We study integer-valued multiplicative dynamics driven by i.i.d. prime multipliers and connect their macroscopic statistics to universal codelengths. We introduce the Multiplicative Turing Ensemble (MTE) and show how it arises naturally -- though not uniquely -- from ensembles of probabilistic Turing machines. Our modeling principle is variational: taking Elias' Omega codelength as an energy and imposing maximum entropy constraints yields a canonical Gibbs prior on integers and, by restriction, on primes. Under mild tail assumptions, this prior induces exponential tails for log-multipliers (up to slowly varying corrections), which in turn generate Pareto-type tails for additive gaps, with the survival exponent shifted by summation over primes. We also prove time-average laws for the Omega codelength along MTE trajectories. Empirically, Debian, PyPI, and CRAN package-size histograms have fitted Omega slopes well below the pure-Omega value $\log 2$, indicating heavier-than-pure-Omega tails within this energy scale. Taken together, the theory--data comparison suggests a qualitative split: machine-adapted regimes (Gibbs-aligned, finite first moment) exhibit clean averaging behavior, whereas human-generated complexity appears to sit beyond this regime, with tails heavy enough to produce an unbounded first moment, and therefore no averaging of the same kind.

23 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; auxiliary code available on GitHub (https://github.com/sashakolpakov/mte-pareto/)