
Claude Shannon: The Bit Player - mxfh
https://thebitplayer.com/
======
abetusk
Shannon was certainly one of the great scientists. His paper "The Mathematical
Theory of Communication" [1] is on the one hand accessible but profound. His
derivation of entropy and the the limits of communication over a noisy channel
are almost simple but I believe this is true only because of hindsight and is,
in my opinion, the hallmark of a deep idea.

We've only recently been able to get close to the Shannon limit with Turbo
Codes [2] and Low Parity Density Checks (LPDC) [3].

For anyone interested, I wrote a short post on deriving entropy and channel
capacity [4].

[1]
[http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...](http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_code)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-density_parity-
check_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-density_parity-check_code)

[4] [https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Shannon-
Entropy/](https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Shannon-Entropy/)

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legohead
The Idea Factory was a pretty enlightening book. I never realized how
important Bell Labs was in our technological history. They purposely sought
out the best minds and gave them freedom to find the next great tech.

~~~
cbm-vic-20
Now we deport them when their visa expires.

~~~
asdf21
I'm pretty sure Visas expired back then too..

~~~
harry8
And when the prospect of losing the cold war is breathing down your neck you
go right ahead and renew visas of those making an important contribution..?

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melling
Haven’t read this yet but it’s on my list:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-
Informatio...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-
Information/dp/1476766681)

This is also a good read:

[http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-
las-v...](http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-vegas-
cheat)

~~~
madcaptenor
It's a good book. The Nautilus article is an excerpt from it.

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GrumpyNl
Why do all video players these days start with volume on full blast? Even
worse, on this player i cant find the volume button.

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ASalazarMX
Had to open the link out of curiosity just to confirm this. It's a Vimeo
embed, but it doesn't show a volume button! Pressing [?] shows the up/down
arrow keys control volume, but I can't confirm it does because my computer
doesn't have sound.

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person_of_color
How can someone be so good at the age of 21? It depresses me.

~~~
av3csr
That early 1900's generation was overflowing with wunderkinds, Fermi, Feynman,
Pauli

~~~
person_of_color
Why don't we have that anymore?

