John Cowan wrote: > John Black scripsit: > > >> Isn't this assumption false with respect to the web? In general, I have no >> idea what states the resources I visit may be in. Any given resource may be >> a novel, a song, a picture, an email message, a movie, a blog post, etc., >> etc. How could I possibly know the N possible states that 8 billion >> resources can be in? >> > > We can if we set some reasonable upper limit to the size of a > representation. For example, if we say that 1 TB is such an upper limit, > then the resource is in one of about 2^(10^15) states, given that there > are about 10^2 media types and there are ~ 10 bits/byte. > Still, this is the wrong assumption. JB is right that Shannon's theory is only meaningful when there is a context. The same bit can mean different things in different context. The implication of your suggestion is that we can assign every possible states a bit pattern. But if cap the size, the implication is that web is closed. If you don't, then the problem comes back to you. XiaoshuReceived on Tuesday, 8 January 2008 12:00:27 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Friday, 17 January 2020 22:56:19 UTC