POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Random suggestion : Re: Random suggestion Server Time
16 Jun 2024 05:47:48 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Random suggestion  
From: Kevin Wampler
Date: 10 Jan 2017 14:17:47
Message: <5875335b$1@news.povray.org>
Ha! Love the post title.

Hmmm, I am by no means anything of an expert on this, but some of the 
points in that video seem either wrong or poorly described.

The main issue I think is that randomness or entropy are not properties 
of a single chunk of data or matter, but apply only to probability 
distributions of data/matter.  If you don't have a probability 
distribution, the appropriate concept is complexity (or 
compressibility), which is related but not the same.  The video tries so 
hard to confuse these concepts it almost appears intentional.

I think this confusion is behind some strange claims in the video.  For 
instance:

	claim: If information is constant, then since information is entropy, 
entropy must be constant, which we know is false from the second law of 
thermodynamics.

Contrary to the video's claims, as far as I'm aware the information in 
the universe is actually believed to be constant, despite the second law 
of thermodynamics.  This is ok, since the second law of thermodynamics 
is really about probability distributions of those states the universe 
might have given our limited observations, but the information content 
is about the state of the entire universe (independent of our 
observations).  So they're really two different things and there's no 
conflict.

In fairness, the speculation at end about quantum mechanics is at least 
semi-reasonable, as it makes it more sensible to really talk about the 
probability distribution of the universe.  Unfortunately I *think* 
wavefunction collapse (presuming as the video does that it exists) would 
actually decrease the quantum-mechanical (i.e. von Neumann) entropy as 
opposed to increase it as the video claims.  I'm a bit out of my depth 
with this though.

All in all, interesting and fun, but I'd caution against trusting it 
much (unless I'm totally wrong here myself, which is certainly possible).


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