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33 bits of information can amount to fewer than 33 pieces of information. Quoting from the article: "...knowing your hometown gives me 16 bits of entropy abou
by pohl 15y ago
33 bits of information can amount to fewer than 33 pieces of information. Quoting from the article: "...knowing your hometown gives me 16 bits of entropy about you".
Edit: a relevant anecdote: when I was in high school, a friend went as an exchange student to Costa Rica. As an experiment, I had her send me a blank postcard with nothing on it but "pohl 68320 USA". It arrived in my post office box without a hitch.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- repsilat 15y agoConversely, though, lots of pieces of data can end up not adding a lot of information, because a lot of data is correlated. Consider the following three facts: 1. A person is Chinese (~2 bits of information) 2. A person lives in Asia (<1 bit of information) 3. A person lives in the USA (4 or 5 bits of information) Now consider combinations of these facts. 1&2 together probably doesn't give you much more than two bits of information still. Conversely, though, 1&3 together give you 10 or 11 bits of information - significantly more than the information of those facts added together. This is because facts 1&2 have a strong positive correlation, and facts 1&3 have a strong negative correlation.