You said:
“If this is tricky, let’s fall back on the idea of disorder. Let’s imagine a Jenga tower . At first, this tower is very ordered. There are no holes anywhere in the tower, and this is only the case if you take all the blocks and stack them neatly together, so it starts out with zero entropy. But then we start pulling pieces out. Ther…
show moreYou said:
“If this is tricky, let’s fall back on the idea of disorder. Let’s imagine a Jenga tower . At first, this tower is very ordered. There are no holes anywhere in the tower, and this is only the case if you take all the blocks and stack them neatly together, so it starts out with zero entropy. But then we start pulling pieces out. There are a whole ton of places where we could pull out one side piece or one middle piece, and the effect on the tower’s stability is going to be the same, so now we have some entropy. If we pull out two pieces, there are now even more (way more) combinations of two pieces that we could pull out and the tower will be equally as stable, so the entropy is even higher. As we pull our more and more pieces, there are going to be more and more combinations that we can’t tell the difference between, so the entropy is going to keep increasing, until finally the entire tower topples. When the tower is just a pile of blocks, it doesn’t matter at all which piece is where, we can’t tell the difference at all, and the jenga blocks have their maximum entropy.”
Hi, I thank you for sharing a lot in the SD forum, I read your posts and like it.
I want to ask you as my position about entropy is quite different. I think that entropy is a matter of point of view. If someone played a game of black jack an ace and a J is a low entropy thing for him, but if he got one while playing poker, and the cards that’s on the table was 6,7,8,9,7 that hand would be a high entropy state for him/her.
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