Power-laws and the Conservation of Information in discrete token   systems: Part 2 The role of defect
  In a matching paper (arXiv:1207.5027), I proved that Conservation of Size and Information in a discrete token based system is overwhelmingly likely to lead to a power-law component size distribution with respect to the size of its unique alphabet. This was substantiated to a very high level of significance using some 55 million lines of source code of mixed provenance. The principle was also applied to show that average gene length should be constant in an animal kingdom where the same constraints appear to hold, the implication being that Conservation of Information plays a similar role in discrete token-based systems as the Conservation of Energy does in physical systems.   In this part 2, the role of defect will be explored and a functional behaviour for defect derived to be consistent with the power-law behaviour substantiated above.   This will be supported by further experimental data and the implications explored. 
Les Hatton
cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP q-bio.GN