Re: Would you call this a paradox?

On 24 Jun., 21:17, "Doug Wedel" <dougwe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> One definition of a paradox is "an apparently true statement or group of
> statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies
> intuition"
>
> Both Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolmogorov define the quantity of
information
> contained in a string in terms of the number of bits required to specify
the
> string.  This seems eminently reasonable -- the fewer the bits required
to
> specify a string, the less "information" it contains -- but it leads
> ineluctably to the conclusion that information is at its maximum in
random
> numbers.
>
> Is it a contradiction to say that random numbers contain "information",
much
> less "maximum information"?  Is it counterintuitive?
>
> Does it fit the definition of a paradox, in your opinion?

This comes if one thinks of information as "what one can learn from
it"
and maybe from a utilizaton aspect of information.
You can surely learn more about me from

   I need to wear gl***** while driving a car

than from the random sequence

   UKiuasdfuiewfUIqwuioghewioTawegwegioszerga

so you would think that you learn more = obtain more information
from the first example.
However, if I requested you to repeat the text above without
glancing at it, you would surely be able to repeat the first
sentence error-free but not the garbage sequence, hence you
were unable to store the (useless) information in your brain
or it would take you a lot of learning to do so.

hagman