[11200] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: building a true RNG (was: Quantum Computing ...)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Honig)
Wed Jul 24 11:29:59 2002
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 12:31:35 -0700
To: jamesd@echeque.com, cryptography@wasabisystems.com
From: David Honig <dahonig@cox.net>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
In-Reply-To: <3D3C8E4D.28977.3A22F4A@localhost>
At 10:59 PM 7/22/02 -0700, jamesd@echeque.com 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
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