#entropy

#entropy

The way most people think about time is wrong. The notion that we share a 'common time' moving in a single direction is a useful illusion but, as physicists have understood since the discoveries of Albert Einstein, it doesn't comport with our understanding of the Universe. However, as the Italian theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli argues in this short documentary from Quanta Magazine, this doesn't mean we should abandon the concept of time altogether.

The ordered state is a low-entropy state, and entropy measures the system's proximity to the most probable (equilibrium) state. Therefore, a system is "far from equilibrium" if its components are statistically correlated, because correlation among components is order. When parts are correlated rather than independent, you have structure.The system occupies a state that's improbable relative to chance. You can predict something about one part by knowing about another.

When attackers steal password hashes from a breach, they brute-force by hashing millions of guesses per second until something matches. The time this takes depends on one thing: how many possible combinations exist. A traditional 8-character "complex" password (P@ssw0rd!) offers roughly 218 trillion combinations. Sounds impressive until you realize modern GPU setups can test those combinations in months, not years. Increase that to 16 characters using only lowercase letters, and you're looking at 26^16 combinations, billions of times harder to crack.

The 1.0 version of Hades 2 is here, along with an assortment of questions and vague pointers about how to actually finish the story. Whether you're jumping into the game for the first time or after being caught up with the story available during Early Access, the path to seeing the resolution of the story and hitting the credits is far from clear.