And indeed I strongly suspect that there are many systems in nature which behave in more or less the same way.

For example, we can move from one point in space to another in more or less any way we choose.

But in fact, such a network has vastly less information.

For usually the structure will involve many nodes, and thus typically require many connections going in more or less the same direction in order to be able to move across the network.

And indeed there usually have to be a huge number of particles doing more or less the same thing before we successfully register it.

But what about sequences that have more or less uniform properties?

The picture at the top of the facing page shows an extremely simple approach that was widely used in practical cryptography until less than a century ago.

What this means is that these problems exhibit a kind of analog of universality which makes it possible with less than exponential effort to translate any instance of any one of them into an instance of any other.

And similarly, if less than half the strings are generated, there must be some string for which neither that string nor its negation ever appear, implying that the system is incomplete.

The Navier–Stokes equations assume that all speeds are small compared to the speed of sound—and thus that the Mach number giving the ratio of these speeds is much less than one. … And by Mach 4 or so, shocks are typically so sharp that changes occur in less than the distance between molecular collisions—making it essential to go beyond the continuum fluid approximation, and account for molecular effects.