  This tutorial provides an overview of and introduction to Rissanen's Minimum
Description Length (MDL) Principle. The first chapter provides a conceptual,
entirely non-technical introduction to the subject. It serves as a basis for
the technical introduction given in the second chapter, in which all the ideas
of the first chapter are made mathematically precise. The main ideas are
discussed in great conceptual and technical detail. This tutorial is an
extended version of the first two chapters of the collection "Advances in
Minimum Description Length: Theory and Application" (edited by P.Grunwald, I.J.
Myung and M. Pitt, to be published by the MIT Press, Spring 2005).
