(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Morning Open Thread. Claude Shannon. More than a mere 'bit' player in history. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-18 "The concept of zero is attributed to the Hindus. The Hindus were also the first to use zero in the way it is used today." --Shakuntala Devi In last week’s Saturday Morning Open Thread I introduced you to three people who developed modern and indispensable technology you use every day and take for granted, but their names are scarcely known in general; very much unlike say, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, or Bill Gates. I also mentioned a fourth person, Claude Shannon, and said I’d talk about him this week. So that’s what’s happening. And because I know all of you are insatiably hungry for math, let’s talk about the Shannon Entropy. It looks like this: Ah, but surely, we can make that a bit easier to understand, can’t we? Let’s try this instead: Two bits of entropy: In the case of two fair coin tosses, the information entropy in bits is the base-2 logarithm of the number of possible outcomes; with two coins there are four possible outcomes, and two bits of entropy. Generally, information entropy is the average amount of information conveyed by an event, when considering all possible outcomes. No? Then let’s take an advert break, cool our brains for a sec, and come back all refreshed, shall we? Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug. Grab your supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, then Hail and Well Met, new Friend. Feeling better now? Onward into infinity with the Shannon Entropy>>>>>> [screeching vinyl record sound effect here] No, we’re not going to go heavy into math. All I’m going to do is briefly talk (well, maybe let a video do the talking for me) about Claude Shannon and why he was so important to today’s world of the interconnected computer web and why without his contributions we sure wouldn’t be communing this way this morning. So, if you already know all about Claude Shannon you can skip this video. If eight minutes is too long, try the second video. Note: This is just an actor portraying Claude Shannon. Rather convincing otherwise. To my mind a short version of what Shannon did is he created the basis of modern digital communications. He saw that any information could be expressed as a number, a very simple number, a number in the simplest form possible perhaps; with but two symbols in its entire inventory yet able to express any number imaginable. “All information can be represented as zeros and ones. Pictures, music, video, all information can be treated the same way. Which means the problem of communication reduces to just two things: how do I convert things to zeros and ones, and how do I make sure that those zeros and ones get through accurately.” “Fifty years on, the final piece of Shannon’s vision of the future was proved to be true. You could have perfect communication with as little errors as you wanted. Any time you store, process, or transmit information in digital form, every time you save a file on a hard drive, play a CD or a DVD, talk on a cell phone, send an email, Tweet, text, Instagram, … you’re relying on the concepts in Shannon’s 1948 paper.” Ah, but what is information? “Information is the resolution of uncertainty.” Real simple: the more unexpected the message, the greater the information content. I’m not going to clog up your airwaves with information that might not be news at all to you, so for the next video just this link: Information Theory. After you watch this video, you will nearly have to be asking yourself: why isn’t Claude Shannon as much a household name as Einstein? He certainly deserves to be. This is a contemporary version of Shannon’s “Ultimate Machine”: * * * * * I don’t know why, but this song got stuck in my head. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/18/2151785/-Morning-Open-Thread-Claude-Shannon-More-than-a-mere-bit-player-in-history Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/