building a true RNG (was: Quantum Computing ...)

[David Honig]

At 10:59 PM 7/22/02 -0700, jamesd at 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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