Charles Liu

What are the possible combinations of heads or tails?

That's right.

If you tossed 100 or 1,000 or a million coins, almost certainly you would wind up with 50% heads and 50% tails.

Yeah.

But there are actually a lot of different combinations.

In fact, if you flip 10 coins, there are 1,024 possible combinations.

Coin one is head, coin two is tail, coin three is head, coin four is tail, coin five is head, etc., etc., etc.

But the number of heads and number of tails at the end of your flipping, there are many fewer than 1,024.

There's only 11.

Right?

0 and 10, 1 and 9, 2 and 8, et cetera.

Yeah.

Right?

So out of the 1,024 flips that you can do, there's only 11 actual results that come up with the numbers of heads and tails.

All of that extra stuff, the other 1,013 rolls, are rolled into the entropy of that 10-coin flip.

In other words, that stuff is the hidden information that will allow you to sort of come up with how often you're going to get five and five, how often you're going to get four and six and so on and so on.

So entropy is hiding in there.

The information you get off the top

is hidden by that stuff inside.

And then right now, what people are doing with quantum computing is really trying to figure out the kinds of entropy, the kinds of disorder that can hide in your systems when you're actually just looking at the top of the system, finding out how many heads and how many tails there are.