Uncertainty and Information

Abstract

A half-century ago Claude Shannon, mathematician and innovative engineer at what was then called the Bell Telephone Laboratories, formulated the idea of information content residing in a message, and in a seminal paper of 1948, he established the discipline that became known as information theory. Though its influence is chiefly in communication engineering, information theory has come to play an important role in more recent years in elucidating the meaning of chance.

Norman … looked at a lot of statistics in his life, searching for patterns in the data. That was something human brains were inherently good at, finding patterns in the visual material. Norman couldn’t put his finger on it, but he sensed a pattern here. He said, “I have the feeling it’s not random.”

Michael Crichton, Sphere