by [anonymous]
1 min read10th Jan 20125 comments

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Suppose you are sitting in front of a screen with white noise. There are all these black and white pixels coming with equal probability at you, conveying maximum traditional Shannon information or Boltzmann information. And still this stream of inputs is totally boring again because, yes, it's very uncompressible. You cannot find a short pattern and you cannot improve your current description of the signal, which again means that there is no compression progress, so this is also boring.

He is contradicting himself. For most purposes the term "white noise" is all you need to know to predict the features that actually matter.

[-][anonymous]12y50

What if it was encrypted interesting data? What if you find the key later, but you only remember the original data as "white noise", you'd kick yourself.

Basically, calling it "white noise" is lossy compression, which may not be a good idea.

You are changing the setup. It was specifically described as white noise, with no embedded information implied. Otherwise it would not be "totally boring", you could play with decompressors and decryptors to try to figure out the hidden content.

Halfway decent encryption is indistinguishable from white noise. It must look totally boring unless you know how to decrypt it. A simple XOR of your data with white noise will produce white noise.

Of course it is. I use it all the time. Please reread what I said: "with no embedded information"