I think the premise is false. You would need about 33 _unique_ bits. I doubt that you can prove the existence of a person-independent algorithm to gather these.
See <strike>comment #12</strike> the comment posted at February 12, 2010 at 5:15 am in the blog post.* The term entropy refers to uniqueness.
As for the development of algorithms to gather those bits, that's what my entire Ph.D. is about and what my blog is mostly about. This is what I've been proving for the last 6 years.
*Just realized comment numbers are unstable. Bad wordpress.
If you want to be very precise, you need evidence which causes at least a 33 bit reduction in entropy between your prior and posterior estimates of the probability of each person in the world being the one you're looking for.
I agree the premise is false also, but it doesn't need to be 33 unique bits either. The combination of the bits has to be unique and that is not something easily provable unless you know the entire dataset, so the premise is just kind of irrelevant to reality I think. They do this same kind of thing on crime shows all the time. He has a blue truck and a mustache. How many people with that description live in lower queens? "13 sir."
