Why is the word "entropy" present in anti-entropy protocols?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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).