Timothy C. May writes:
Well, I don't view any of the "simple definitions" of randomness as especially useful; that is, the simple definitions have a kind of circularity (implicit in the points we both make). For example, "an object is "random" if it has no shorter description than itself," the classic Solomonoff-Kolmogorov-Chaitin definition, is quite elegant, but doesn't help much in many cases.
Except that it goes against our normal definitions of random in a crypto context. A string that is compressable might still be random. There is no reason you can't have a string of 20 1 bits in a row in a perfectly random sequence, for example. Usually, random sequences are non-compressable, but it is possible (though very improbable) for Hamlet to appear out of a random number generator, and it is of course quite compressable... Perry