Viewing profile — xkcdentropy

I understand randomly selected words are not the same as the English text Shannon is talking about. However my point is that entropy may be lower than what it appears to be. I'm no…

I am merely suggesting that the entropy can be less than what is estimated by looking only at the dictionary. Re 1: words still consist of characters Re 2: Certainly correct, but t…

You deny the fact that English text can be attacked separately from your dictionary. English text is very predictable, for example e is much more common and q is almost certainly f…

This is simply incorrect. If you assume you really do have 100 000 "characters" in your alphabet this is correct. However, your alphabet follows a certain pattern: It's English tex…

The XKCD comic is only partially correct. Depending on what source you believe English text has about 0.6 to 2.3 bits of entropy per character. This means you need somewhere betwee…