by Scott Aaronson
That the semantics of a message
are irrelevant to how to transmit it,
that the distribution from which the message was
chosen is all that
matters,
is obvious.
Should've been obvious to the Babylonians,
Greeks, Egyptians.
Why, among the thousands of ideas put forward
by Aristotle, Augustine,
Maimonides,
Kant, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche,
Mary Baker Eddy,
was
there nowhere the almost trivial observation
that to encrypt
perfectly you need a key
the size of the message itself?
or that
almost all functions
have exponential circuit complexity?
I wandered out of the library
and saw a girl sketching the landscape,
breasts straining against the V of her sweater,
surrounded by laughing
guys
who'd probably never even seen the entropy formula,
and then I
knew.