Information-Theory

Oblivious Computing: Privacy Through Approximation

Entropy Maps: When Hashing Meets Information Theory

A conceptual introduction to entropy maps—implementing functions with hash functions and prefix-free codes.

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms

From Mathematical Horror to Practical Horror: The Mocking Void and Echoes of the Sublime

How The Mocking Void's arguments about computational impossibility connect to Echoes of the Sublime's practical horror of exceeding cognitive bandwidth.

Compositional Abstractions for Computing Under Ignorance: Or, What I Learned by Analyzing My Own Research as Data

I asked an AI to brutally analyze my entire body of work—140+ repositories, 50+ papers, a decade and a half of research. The assignment: find the patterns I couldn’t see, the obsessions I didn’t know I had, the unifying thesis underlying …

Bernoulli Types: A New Foundation for Approximate and Oblivious Computing

I’ve been working on a series of papers that develop a unified theoretical framework for approximate and oblivious computing, centered around what I call Bernoulli types. These papers explore how we can build rigorous foundations for systems …

Maximizing Confidentiality in Encrypted Search Through Entropy Optimization

Rethinking Encrypted Search: From Access Pattern Leakage to Information-Theoretic Privacy

Encrypted search has a fundamental problem: you can’t hide what you’re looking for. Even with the best encryption, search patterns leak information. My recent work develops a new approach using oblivious Bernoulli types to achieve …

All Induction Is the Same Induction

Solomonoff induction, MDL, speed priors, and neural networks are all special cases of one Bayesian framework with four knobs.

The Beautiful Deception: How 256 Bits Pretend to be Infinity

How do you store infinity in 256 bits? An exploration of the fundamental deception at the heart of cryptography: using finite information to simulate infinite randomness.

Perfect Hashing: Space Bounds, Entropy, and Cryptographic Security

What if a perfect hash function could simultaneously be: (1) cryptographically secure, (2) space-optimal, and (3) maximum-entropy encoded? This paper proves such a construction exists—and analyzes exactly what you sacrifice to get all three.

The …