3 ms·

I believe the comment you responded to is referring to the concept of entropy in information theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

• gnulinux 6y ago
  Hmm I believe you're correct. The answer to my problem above seems to be that even though information is encoded in 8 bits in both cases, one of them is a lot of more dense.
  • carapace 6y ago
    Yes, it's a fundamental result from Information Theory. In the situation you describe the receiver has to know which distribution you're using. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity