Hacker News Reader

I agree that there is "information" in the colloquial sense there, or even in the Kolmogorov sense. I don't understand how there is information in the entropy sense, because I do not see a random variable anywhere in this story.

View on HN

I believe we are talking about Shannon's direct analogy between information and entropy here. The low probabliity of the atoms of the spaceship being arranged as they are - a specific design of a spaceship - out of all their possible arrangements, is a state of low entropy and high information content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

That was what I was talking about, yes.

Entropy isn't necessarily random. I think a better description of entropy might be unimportant states. For the rocket, we might care about the total mass and we might even care about the temperature of those bolts. Those parameters represent information.

But there's even more information in the rocket, specifically the momentum*position of each of the atoms within the bolt. That quantity for each atom is measurable/knowable and represents information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com