FILE ARCHIVERS TO EVALUATE THE KOLMOGOROV COMPLEXITY
An approach to the research of the similarity of websites using Kolmogorov complexity and normalized compression distance was proposed in previous works by one of the authors. A certain potential of such an approach was revealed. At the same time, a number of questions that need to be answered before automating the conduct of large studies was formulated. One of these questions relates to the archiver programs used in practice as a so-called method of description, and it is whether you can choose the best archiver. In this article, the question is investigated in detail. The authors conducted a series of experiments with nine of the most popular and accessible archivers, which allowed to verify the implementation of the properties of idempotency, monotony, symmetry and distributivity for these programs in practice. The best four archivers were experimentally tested for the implementation of distance axioms for the normalized compression distance, calculated using them. Their implementation is shown. All stages of the experiments were automated using developed auxiliary programs for downloading the first pages of sites in html format, creating file concatenations, compressing files with various archivers, and calculating the normalized compression distance. The authors settled on the RAR program, as the most convenient to use, and conducted a hierarchical clustering of a given set of sites using it. This clustering almost completely corresponds to the site development companies, which indicates the identification of the site development style inherent in each company using the proposed approach and the «best» archiver.