At 10:59 PM 7/22/02 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Entropy is not quite a physical quantity -- rather it is on the >slippery edge between being a physical thing and a philosophical >thing. If you are not careful, you will slip into a deep epistemic >bog and find yourself needing to ask "how do we know what is >knowable, and what is the whichness of why?" > >To avoid such deep waters, know where your entropy is coming from.
We agree on your substantive points re RNGs, I think, but you're interestingly wrong here. Entropy is a physical quantity, it even figures into chemistry. The physics-of-computation people (Bennett? Landaur? etc) have written about thermodynamics & information. Modulo Chaitin-type mindgames about measuring it :-) Anyway we're cryptographers, not philosophers, so we should be safe.. "Four wheeling through the epistemological bog" with Shannon as copilot --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
