alt Hacker NewsThink minimum description length. Low entropy states require fewer terms to fully describe than high entropy states. This is an objective property of the system.
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In a deterministic system you can just use the time as a way to describe a state, if you started from a known state.
You're thinking of information entropy, which is not the same concept as entropy in physics. An ice cube in a warm room can be described using a minimum description length as "ice cube in a warm room" (or a crystal structure inside a fluid space), but if you wait until the heat death of the universe, you just have "a warm room" (a smooth fluid space), which will have an even shorter mdl. Von Neuman should never have repurposed the term entropy from physics. Entropy confuses a lot of people, including me.
“Number of terms” is a human language construct.