From: gts (gts@optexinc.com)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 13:03:05 MDT
Eugene,
Continuing my reply to an earlier message of yours (lest you think I
wasn't listening :)
> Assuming digital physics is true, I must try to make guessing
> the state as hard as possible. A large nonlinear system is
> a) amplifying intrinsic initial state knowledge uncertainty
> b) amplifying noise it picks up from anything in within lightcone
> it resides. Choosing a very small, strange system like a single
> photon hitting a beam splitter makes me cringe with
> unease.
Have you looked closely at the hotbits device described at
www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how.html? John Walker has gone to great lengths
to control for possible biases that might be introduced by the apparatus
itself. It's an ingenious device; I would challenge you to find the
holes in its design that might make you "cringe with unease."
Briefly, John's device measures the genuinely random time intervals
between the emissions of successive beta particles from atoms of
Krypton-85. If an interval is shorter than the subsequent interval, his
device records this event as a 1. If an interval longer than the
subsequent interval then his device records this event as a O. Because
the relative difference in time intervals are genuinely random
(undermined and unpredictable according to conventional QM) the sequence
of 1's and 0's is genuinely random.
He controls for possible biases that might be introduced by the
measuring device in two ways, (and this is I think the true genius of
the device): 1) if two intervals are measured to be the same, they are
thrown out. Only interval pairs with a measured difference are used, and
2) the rule for determining if the relative intervals should be recoded
as 1 or a 0 is reversed each time, so that if there is a bias due to
imperfections in the device, that bias will favor neither 1's nor 0's.
Its beauty is really in its simplicity. Perhaps it's only a matter of
taste, but I am more likely to "cringe with unease" about the "large
non-linear system" that you refer to. The larger and more complex the
device, the more ways there are that it can go wrong. (I'd be
interested, by the way, in an actual physical description of such a
device.)
-gts
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