Wolfe's Puzzles

Jeff Wilson · 27 Jul 2010, 14:04 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:04:46 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Puzzles
In-Reply-To: <293F652B433B432391104C81DE3F2490@jill>
References: <SNT123-W52AE66C3C8EA2DAECC1441CFB60 at phx.gbl>
	<293F652B433B432391104C81DE3F2490@jill>
Message-ID: <4C4EE77E.1070307 at io.com>

This is another old post come unstuck in the works:

On 7/10/2010 3:24 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> 5553 8783 4223 9700 34
>>
>> 2221 0401 1101 7276 56
>>
>> SEALED FOR THE MONARCH
>>
> I take the view that it is essentially random. It is a fundamental point
> of algorithmic information theory that almost all numbers are. Why
> should this number, essentially a barcode for one not especially
> important storeroom, be special?
>
> I don't see it as a 'trick' to make them random, because logically they
> should be random. Of course I cannot tell whether they are in fact
> random. [There is also an important theorem that strings - or numbers -
> above a certain length cannot be *proven* to be random!]

Oh, no, there are huge amounts of correspondence here - you see how 
often the same digit appears in series, or in the same group? There are 
many parallels between the upper and lower lines, considerable amounts 
of consecutive digits and those separated by a single digit.

Overall, English has an entropy of just a little more than one bit per 
character; totally random digits have ln10/ln2 or about 3.2 bits per of 
entropy per character. This number stream (based on the difference 
between consecutive digits) has about 2 - almost certainly some kind of 
selection going on here.

Or at least, this is what I gather from having taken Intro to 
Information Theory; I'll see if I can ask my prof about it.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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