28 OCT 2024 by ideonexus
Quantifying Information Content Does Not Bring Meaning Fr...
It is perfectly true that redundancy aids recognition of a signal as a language or a code, and this recognition is crucial to SETI. However, Shannon’s method provides only a quantitative measure of the complexity of a language or signaling system—not a translation. And while it is axiomatic in cryptology that redundancy helps in deciphering a text, the task of decipherment/cryptanalysis is to move from an encoded text to the original text—not from text to meaning. To get from text to me...Folksonomies: information science communication
Folksonomies: information science communication
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notesWe may be able to quantify the information content of an alien signal, but that is very different from deriving the meaning from the signal.
04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Types of Information in Games
In The Interactive Book, designer and scholar Celia Pearce presents a different typology for understanding the ways games manifest information. She proposes four scenarios:
· Information known to all players: In Chess, this would consist of the rules of the game, board layout,
and piece movement parameters.
· Information known to only one player: In Gin, this would be the cards in your hand.
· Information known to the game only: In Gin, this would be unused cards in deck. In Space Invad... 1 notes
notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Shannon's Learning Mouse Theseus
Theseus was propelled by a pair of magnets, one embedded in its hollow core, and one moving freely beneath the maze. The mouse would begin its course, bump into a wall, sense that it had hit an obstacle with its “whiskers,” activate the right relay to attempt a new path, and then repeat the process until it hit its goal, a metallic piece of cheese. The relays stored the directions of the right path in “memory”: once the mouse had successfully navigated the maze by trial and error, it ... 1 notes
notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy of English language is a Goldilocks zone for C...
In Shannon’s terms, the feature of messages that makes codecracking possible is redundancy. A historian of cryptography, David Kahn, explained it like this: “Roughly, redundancy means that more symbols are transmitted in a message than are actually needed to bear the information.” Information resolves our uncertainty; redundancy is every part of a message that tells us nothing new. Whenever we can guess what comes next, we’re in the presence of redundancy. Letters can be redundant: be... 1 notes
notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy in the English Language
Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple.I Because these rules render certain patterns more likely and certain patterns almost impossible, languages like English come well short of complete uncertainty and maximal information: the sequence “th” has already occurred 6,431 times in this book, the sequence “tk” just this once. From the perspective of the information theorist, our languages are hugely predictable— al... 1 notes
notesMonte Carlo method for building words and sentences.
05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Rapid Growth of Physics
As a result of the phenomenally rapid change and growth of physics, the men and women who did their great work one or two generations ago may be our distant predecessors in terms of the state of the field, but they are our close neighbors in terms of time and tastes. This may be an unprecedented state of affairs among professionals; one can perhaps be forgiven if one characterizes it epigrammatically with a disastrously mixed metaphor; in the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit si... 1 notes
notesReminds me of the rapid growth of IT, where working with people just 10 years older marks a phenomenal difference in technological understanding.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Measuring Cultural Information
But there may be more significant ways to characterize civilizations than by the
energy they use for communications purposes. An important criterion of a
civilization is the total amount of information that it stores. This information can
be described in terms of bits, the number of yes-no statements concerning itself
and the universe that such a civilization knows.
An example of this concept is the popular game of "Twenty Questions," as
played on Earth. One player imagines an object or conc... 1 notes
notesThe number of bits communicated in our radio broadcasts is quite enormous, conveying a great deal of information about our culture.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Number of Bits for a Set of Encyclopedias are Minuscule C...
I have estimaged how many letters there are in a the Enclyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide--which is the barest piece of dust t... 1 notes
notesFeynman estimates the number of atoms neccessary for storing a set of encyclopedias, and then compares that to the amount of data included in a DNA string.
