- #36
Hurkyl
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
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- 26
So you are equating "variety" with "information".Rade said:I am not talking about individual events, but "sets" of events. The "set" {A,A,A,A,A} has less "variety" (thus information) than the "set" {A,B,C,A,D}. The first set has variety of one element, the second set has variety of four elements.
That doesn't make sense to me -- if I flip a nickel and a penny. Surely you would agree that describing the outcomes would be two bits of information?
So, I don't see why one would think {H, H} conveys less information than {H, T} -- in fact, I would say exactly the opposite! {H, H} completely describes the outcome of our experiment, but if the describe the outcome as {H, T} we still have no idea which coin was heads, and which coin was tails.
Oh, hrm. Maybe you're thinking complexity theory-like ideas: {A, A, A, A, A} is certainly less complex than {A, B, C, A, D}. But this answers a different question! There are two ways to talk about them:
(1) How much information does each set convey?
(2) How much information is required to describe each set?
And I think they are entirely different questions. (You're talking about (2))