Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/iii/paper-66/5/i/solution

For , normalize the remaining probabilities by , . Directly splitting the Shannon entropy sum gives
Here is the binary entropy. The Shannon entropy of a distribution on points is at most . For example, nonnegativity of its Kullback-Leibler divergence from the uniform distribution gives . Thus the entropy bound with one prescribed probability is
For , equality holds precisely when the remaining probabilities are all . For , the distribution is deterministic and both sides are zero. The displayed formula is for ; a one-point alphabet simply has zero Shannon entropy.

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