A concern has been expressed that ``the Jaynes principle can produce fake
entanglement'' [R. Horodecki et al., Phys. Rev. A {\bf 59}, 1799 (1999)]. In
this paper we discuss the general problem of distilling maximally entangled
states from N copies of a bipartite quantum system about which only partial
information is known, for instance in the form of a given expectation value. We
point out that there is indeed a problem with applying the Jaynes principle of
maximum entropy to more than one copy of a system, but the nature of this
problem is classical and was discussed extensively by Jaynes. Under the
additional assumption that the state ρ(N) of the N copies of the
quantum system is exchangeable, one can write down a simple general expression
for ρ(N). We show how to modify two standard entanglement purification
protocols, one-way hashing and recurrence, so that they can be applied to
exchangeable states. We thus give an explicit algorithm for distilling
entanglement from an unknown or partially known quantum state.Comment: 20 pages RevTeX 3.0 + 1 figure (encapsulated Postscript) Submitted to
Physical Review