Re: Truly Random Numbers On A Quantum Computer??

On Sat, 29 Mar 2025 20:25:23 -0300, Ethan Carter wrote:

There's also an interesting paper by Anna Johnston on entropy, in which
she makes the (correct, in my opinion) remark that entropy really is a
relative notion.

That makes sense. I’ve long thought that one’s estimates of the
probabilities of various events depends very much on one’s point of view.

I think Bayes’ Theorem says as much.

I get the feeling here that, by the same token, you could never have a
provably secure cryptosystem because someone knows the private key?

None of our cryptosystems are provably secure. RSA depends on the assumed
difficulty of two problems: factorizing large integers, and computing
discrete logarithms, and would break if either one was solved. There is no
proof that either of these problems is actually hard: we simply don’t know
of any good algorithms for them, after decades, even centuries of looking.