hi,
Okay- I need 5 bits to represent 32 coins.I count as coin 0,coin 1,... coin 31. If it is a perfectly random fair coin throwing experiment,then 50 percent of them will be heads.
So I know that 16 of them will be heads.
I hope you are not saying that you think there will always be 16 heads and 16 tails!
Your comment below seems to suggest you think this is so. If so, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about probability.
What we do is i simply place all the 32 coins on the table in a row or column. I look at the first coin and determine if it is a head or a tail. I repeat the same proccess till i count 16 heads. If I count 15 heads at coin 31, then I cant reduce the entropy. How ever, if i count 16 heads at coin 30,then I dont have to check that coin 31,I already know its a tail,so I have less than 5 bits of entropy.
How does knowing what has already come before tell you that coin 31 is a tail without your having to look at it to see?
It certainly sounds to me that you have a very weird, and very wrong, concept of probability.
--Tim May
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler
