entropy

Description

Compute Shannon Entropy for a byte stream

See: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Entropy.html

Example

The command line tool can be invoked without any arguments. It will emit the bits-per-byte value of entropy before it exits.

$ dd if=/dev/random bs=128 count=1 | ./main
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
128 bytes transferred in 0.000020 secs (6391320 bytes/sec)
6.506879566572159

Benchmarks

No particular optimizations have been done. This is a simple implementation.

$ go test -bench=.
PASS
BenchmarkShannon	   50000	     72996 ns/op
ok		github.com/lazybeaver/entropy	4.398s