rick hoselton writes:
At 10:07 AM 4/16/96 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
...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...
But even if it came from a completely random source, it would still make a bad one-time pad.
No it wouldn't. There is a tiny but nonzero probability that xoring your one time pad with your text will result in a cyphertext equal to, say, the Bible. Big deal. If the key is really random, the cryptanalyst has no way to tell what the underlying text was.
In the context of "fair coin flips" the text of Hamlet is NOT compressible.
Huh? There is only one context in which things are compressable or not -- is there a smaller representation for them.
Because no string is more likely than any other. Any algorithm that could compress that string, will, on the average INCREASE the length of "fair coin flip" strings it tries to compress.
True enough, but the claim was that a random string has no representation which is smaller than itself. .pm