> Randomness is not a property of a single file. You can't look at a byte sequence and say that "it's random". Interestingly, this is less true than you might

> Randomness is not a property of a single file. You can't look at a byte sequence and say that "it's random". Interestingly, this is less true than you might think. The mathematics of Kolmogorov complexity[1] formalizes the idea that a given finite fixed string is "random". In this framework, you can have a byte sequence that definitely is random. (However, your second sentence I quoted is still technically true here as well because it is algorithmically undecidable how random the string is.) (In fact one of the definitions of a random string is one that is incompressible, i.e. there is no algorithm with shorter description than the string that produces the string.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity