On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 2:08 PM, Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > Stefan Ram wrote: >> >> Well, then one can ask about the entropy of a data source >> that only is emitting this message. > > > You can, but it's still the *source* that has the entropy, > not the message. > > (And the answer in that case is that the entropy is zero. > If there's only one possible message you can ever send, you > don't need to send it at all!)
One bit. It might send the message, or it might NOT send the message. And I have known situations in which that is exactly the system used. Back before mobile phones were common, you could sometimes use a payphone to cause someone's phone to ring, but you couldn't actually speak on it. So you had one message you could send: "brrrring brrrrring". A pre-arranged meaning for that message might be "I'm at the railway station, please come and pick me up"... but there's still *some* information in the mere fact of the call. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
