What is entropy? A perspective from games of chance

Sarah Brandsen, Isabelle Jianing Geng, Gilad Gour

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The crucial role of channels in physics and information theory motivates the task of characterizing the entropy, or uncertainty, of a channel. Games of chance become a natural candidate for this task, as a system's performance in a gambling game depends solely on the uncertainty of its output. In this work, we construct families of games that induce preorders corresponding to majorization, conditional majorization, and channel majorization. Finally, we provide operational interpretations for all preorders, show the relevance of these results to dynamical resource theories, and find the only asymptotically continuous classical channel entropy.

Original languageEnglish
Article number024117
JournalPhysical Review E
Volume105
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2022
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
  • Statistics and Probability
  • Condensed Matter Physics

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