Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 164 3 ii Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Let be the set of valid quintuples and choose uniformly from . ThenApply Shearer's inequality to the ten pairs . Every index occurs in four pairs, so
Put . Since , it has cardinality . For each element of , its membership bits in are one of ; outside they are forced to be . Thus at most ordered pairs have any prescribed union. The chain rule for information entropy, conditional entropy, and the support bound for information entropy givebecause every belongs to . There are ten pairs, henceExponentiating proveswhich is the five-variable case of the entropy bound for pairwise-union tuples.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 224 1 b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Independence makesa Markov chain. The data processing inequality for mutual information therefore gives . Translation by the known value of is a bijection, so conditional entropy and independence giveand . Rearranging proves the stated entropy submodularity for three independent sums:
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2026 iii Paper 224 4 c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Monotonicity of the ordered probabilities gives , so . ConsequentlyGiven , the source symbol can take at most values. The maximum entropy distribution on a finite set is uniform, henceAveraging this conditional entropy inequality proves