Re: Spetner and Shannon

mortongr@flash.net
Thu, 16 Sep 1999 10:49:21 +0000

At 10:24 AM 09/16/1999 -0700, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
Show me Shannon's ideas
>expressed in another popular book (I hasven't seen that one) and then we
>can compare apples with apples.

Art, I would respectfully submit that the problem we have in the area of
info theory is exactly that people who don't know the mathematical
definition and don't care about shannon's equation feel perfectly free to
discuss the issue in popular books and make up their own ideas. This
completely muddies the situation and confuses everyone. As I said, I don't
have a problem with Spetner's use of info theory in a couple of his
articles, but I haven't read the book (I know, shame on me, I should have,
but life has been out of whack for the past 9 months with the merger, move,
theft and other things)

By the way, Szilard (1929) was the first person to actually come up with
Shannon's equation (albeit in simplified form) and in a context of
discussing the information required by Maxwell's demon. It took another 20
years and Shannon to actually make clear that information and entropy are
twins.
glenn

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