The paper “On the complexity of automatic complexity” is to appear in Theory of Computing Systems, in a post-conference journal issue for Computability, Complexity and Randomness 2015 held in Heidelberg, Germany.

While it is not known whether the set of strings of maximal nondeterministic automatic complexity is NP-complete (hence the paper is called “On the complexity…” rather than just “The complexity…”), the paper shows that the more general problem for automatic complexity of equivalence relations is NP-complete. It is also shown that the set of highly complex strings is not context-free.