Aram Perez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Entropy is a highly discussed unit of measure. > > And very often confused.
Apparently. > While you do want maximum entropy, maximum > entropy is not sufficient. The sequence of the consecutive numbers 0 > - 255 have maximum entropy but have no randomness (although there is > finite probability that a RNG will produce the sequence). One person might claim that the sequence of numbers 0 to 255 has 256 bytes of entropy. Another person will note "the sequence of numbers 0-255" completely describes that sequence and is only 30 bytes long. Indeed, more compact ways yet of describing that sequence probably exist. Therefore, we know that the sequence 0-255 does not, in fact, have "maximum entropy" in the sense that the entropy of the sequence is far lower than 256 bytes and probably far lower than even 30 bytes. Entropy is indeed often confusing. Perhaps that is because both the Shannon and the Kolmogorov-Chaitin definitions do not provide a good way of determining the lower bound of the entropy of a datum, and indeed no such method can exist. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
