[ExI] The unlimited size of qubits.

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 7:25 PM Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:

* > you read 1984 when you were X years old.  It contained a string of
> bytes that represembles the exact text authored by Orwell.  You read it
> again when you are 2X years old; same exact bytes so it's the same
> information - but you experience a slightly different story thanks to
> additional X years of subjective context.*



Information content is a measure of surprise so if you're rereading 1984
it's not as surprising as the first time you read it even if you've
forgotten some of it, so the informational context of rereading is less.
Another example is a fire alarm, lets say in any given minute there is one
chance it 10,000 it will go off so if the alarm doesn't go off it's not
very surprising so you haven't learned much but you've learned a little and
we calculate exactly how much.

The informational content is the base 2 log of 1/p where p is the
probability, the probability the alarm will *not* go off is 9999/10000 and
the base 2 log of 10000/9999 is only .000144 . But the probability the
alarm will go off is 1/10000 and the log base 2 of 10000 is 13.2877. So if
the alarm does go off you get a 13.2877 bit message but if it doesn't go
off you only get a .000144 bit message.

 John K Clark
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