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Anti-entropy protocols are a form of gossip protocols. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol. I was wondering if someone could explain, the the significance of word entropy here.

Sharvanath
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The noise creeping into the messages can be seen as a form of growing entropy in the message content. Cancelling the noise (in this case by comparing multiple replicas of the original message) is a form of entropy lowering process (i.e. an anti-entropy process, since entropy is never decreasing on its own).

peterph
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    @Sharvanath entropy itself is not a process, rather is it a statistical quality (usually in the field of physics or informatics), which never decreases (on it's own). I'm reading that page so that the a-e processes are working against the "natural" way entropy does. In the case of replica reconciliation it is not the process of comparing the copies itself but its output (something that seems to be the correct "average" closest to the original) that works against the noise (entropy) added during transmissions/copying earlier. – peterph Nov 05 '12 at 10:12