Re: Dawkins' video

Glenn R. Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Fri, 12 Jun 1998 21:39:21 -0500

At 11:41 AM 6/12/98 -0700, Cliff Lundberg wrote:
>Glenn R. Morton wrote:
>
>> Polyploidy increases the information content
>> of a cell and that is not theoretical.
>
>Do two dictionaries have more information content
>than one?

Mathematically it does. Information can be measured by either
compressibility or by an entropy-like equation. Via compressibility, the
sequence which can be compressed the most, has the least information.
Consider the sequence.

AAAAAAAAAA.

It can be compressed to the sequence:

10A.

There is very little information in this sequence.

Now consider the sequence

ABCDEFGHIJ.

It cannot be compressed any further than its own length. But lets add two
of them together.

ABCDEFGHIJABCDEFGHIJ

This can be compressed to

2ABCDEFGHIJ.

Note that this sequence has one more character than the original sequence
ABCDEFGHIJ. Because of this, there is more information in the two
sequences than in the one by itself.
glenn

Adam, Apes and Anthropology
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