Shannon called it "communication theory"

[Chris Landauer]

it was somebody else, later, who called it "information theory", thus
confusing the issue of information as a measure of uncertainty or potential
surprise reduction in a system COMPLETELY CHARACTERIZED by probabilities, and
information as we might normally construe the term non-technically

this confusion has caused an enormous amount of nonsense to be published by
people who forget that you need to have a probability distribution before the
theory has any meaning at all, and that different probability distributions or
different definitions of fundamental units (the points over which the
probability is distributed) make the values completely different

i basically agree with the technical definition given already (just so you
know that i'm only complaining about one thing 8-))

more later,
cal

Dr. Christopher Landauer
Aerospace Integration Science Center
The Aerospace Corporation, Mail Stop M6/214
P.O.Box 92957
Los Angeles, California 90009-2957, USA
e-mail: address@hidden
Phone: +1 (310) 336-1361




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