
Claude Shannon Turns 1100100 - anthotny
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/claude-shannon-the-father-of-the-information-age-turns-1100100
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tunap
Try to imagine where we would be today if Bell Labs and/or MIT had fired him
for his eccentricities, "trivial" distractions and prolonged absences. Imagine
if he hadn't been present when Bardeen & Brattain(and subsequently Shockley)
produced the modern transistor and took off on one of his tangential side
projects. Just "wow".

edit: giving Bardeen & Brattain their due.

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IamFermat
When I was at MIT, we spent a History of CS class on him. The fact that you
can calculate te theoretical limit on info transmitted given a channel's
parameters is kinda mind-blowing. Like Einstein figuring our theoretical limit
on velocity.

He also wrote one of the most important master theses ever - from his NYT obit
- "In what has been described as one of the most important master's theses
ever written, he showed how Boolean logic, in which problems can be solved by
manipulating just two symbols, 1 and 0, could be carried out automatically
with electrical switching circuits. The symbol 1 could be represented by a
switch that was turned on; 0 would be a switch that was turned off."

~~~
eru
The other important Master Thesis is probably Gödel's.

~~~
hsileng
True. Wonder what other Master's theses that were underrated at publication
but went on to be seminal....

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Cyph0n
I hate non-standard length binary numbers! Just write 01100100 for God's
sake...

On topic, Shannon is my favorite scientist of the last century, after von
Neumann of course. If his only contribution was connecting Boolean algebra to
digital logic, he would have been a pioneer. But no, he goes ahead and defines
information theory out of nowhere, even though the majority of applications
that can utilize it were not yet practical! I mean, come on Claude!

~~~
svantana
Do you also prefer "standard" lengths of decimal numbers, and if so, what are
those?

On a related note, I once had the weirdest bug in a C program that I couldn't
figure out. It turns out that I had stylized an array of integers with
preceding zeros, like: {025, 057, 112} to make it pretty. Little did I know
that those zeros made the numbers octal!

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jacobolus
Using an initial 0 to indicate octal is a terrible convention. I’m very glad
that Python 3 makes 0123 into a syntax error, and uses the form 0o123 instead
for octal literals, to match the style of 0x53 (also adds 0b1010011 for
binary).

~~~
Tiksi
I wonder if there's a reason for keeping the leading 0 there past
tradition/convention. 0x as a prefix makes sense to differentiate between 0x12
and 012, but if it's 0x 0b and 0o, imo it'd make more sense to drop it and
just leave it as o12, b12, x12, etc.

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MaxGabriel
o12, b12, and x12 are all valid variable names

~~~
Tiksi
Yeah... not sure how that slipped my mind, seems quite obvious now. Thanks

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epsilon
on Shannon Laboratory (from [https://around.com/where-are-they-now-bell-
labs/](https://around.com/where-are-they-now-bell-labs/)):

 _[quote]AT &T was always oblivious to Shannon’s role as the father of modern
communications, and (with its usual tin ear), couldn’t figure out how to
benefit from its own history.

Back when Lucent split from AT&T and was granted most of Bell Labs (along with
bragging rights for the invention of the transistor), I was busy trying to
convince AT&T that a services company required an R&D capability. The original
divestiture plan did not anticipate a basic research component—only a
development lab. Long story, but eventually we managed to slide over around
10% of the scientists into the new AT&T Labs.

However, we couldn’t slide over its long history, mostly rooted in the
physical sciences. We had the people, but lacked a well defined “brand.” By
odd coincidence, I proposed if Bell Labs was granted computing in the divorce,
we should own communications—and claim Shannon as our direct forebear.

AT&T HQ was ambivalent—they were unaware of Shannon’s seminal discoveries, and
couldn’t imagine how claiming paternity of the communications revolution could
benefit a long distance phone company. But we were given permission to name a
lab building after Shannon. Fortunately, one of the lab’s directors (Ron
Graham) was a mathematician and juggler and knew Shannon’s widow, and received
permission.

But they still barely leverage this connection. Momentum is sometimes more
powerful than entropy.[/quote]_

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justin66
The genius featured in almost all the CS textbooks who never won a Turing
Award. I don't even know exactly where that ranks on my list of reasons for
strongly disliking the ACM, but it's on there.

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dkopi
"Claude Shannon" is actually "Amazing Genius" encrypted with a one time pad.

~~~
DonHopkins
"Claude Shannon" is also an anagram for "Chaos Laden Nun".

~~~
Intermernet
Unfortunately, also "Nachos Unladen"

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navbaker
The information regarding the unladen state of the nachos can be compressed
into fewer bits by just saying "chips".

~~~
dkopi
You'd probably understand if it was "chps" too.

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nzoschke
Claude Shannon is my favorite scientist too. He made break throughs in the
most literal sense. Everything was different after The Mathematical Theory of
Communication.

I feel lucky and proud to have studied his work, through the lens of signals
and systems, at his Alma Mater, University of Michigan.

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fitzwatermellow
IEEE also had a nice retrospective:

Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/claude-
shannon-t...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/claude-shannon-
tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory)

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drcode
His insights are so fundamental and easy to state that it would have been nice
for them to give an example: "Suppose you send ones and zeroes through a wire
and noise causes 10% of the digits to randomly flip the wrong way. How much
data, if any, can you send through the wire?"

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TheCoreh
We're only 28 years away from a nice, round number!

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kelukelugames
I love today's Google Doodle.

[http://www.google.com/doodles/claude-shannons-100th-
birthday](http://www.google.com/doodles/claude-shannons-100th-birthday)

~~~
sethrin
Many people seem to. I've actually been looking for negative feedback, since I
thought some of the earlier drafts were better. I am just some guy with an
opinion though. Overall it was a really difficult piece, given how abstract
Shannon's work was -- what sort of visual metaphor do you use for the man
whose work was to split the concept of "communication" from any concrete
implementation? But, I am happy that people like his work, and I will
certainly pass along your compliments.

~~~
kelukelugames
You are looking for negative feedback for another Googler's work? Well that's
not very googly.

~~~
sethrin
I am not employed by Google. If I were, I would still have a right to disagree
with the art direction. The execution was fine; I preferred other concepts
which did more to display Shannon's work. Shannon's juggling was about as
relevant as the flamethrowing trumpet he designed. Juggling was supposed to be
more 'accessible'. Should doodles be representative, or accessible?

~~~
kelukelugames
My bad. You are literally just a guy with opinions. I thought you were
soliciting for feedback on a public forum for a coworker. I got confused.

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cperciva
Seeing a seven-bit value with three ones, my brain autocorrected 1100100 to
1101000 in order to turn this into a codeword in a perfect cyclic code...

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wodenokoto
I feel like the article ends very abruptly. It would have been nice with a few
words on what he did in his late years and at least have his death mentioned
towards the end, so the reader gets a feel of actually going through his life.

It seems odd to end at a conference he showed up to once.

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CurtHagenlocher
As an aside, Dr. McEliece was one of the best teachers I had while at Caltech,
with an amazing ability to present dry material an a way that was both
informative and interesting.

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justifier
i love a story where studying a flaw in a system creates an entirely new area
of study

investigating line noise was also a part of mandelbrot's revelation on self
similarity

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justifier
his original 1937 thesis(o) is extremely approachable, as is the case with
many papers where a new concept is developed therein

i recommend reading it

(o)
[http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425-MIT.pdf?sequence=2)

~~~
justifier
fun quote:

" This design requires that the primes less than 10,000 be known. If desired,
the machine could be made to automatically connect in new counters as the
primes were found, but there are many accurate tables of primes up to 10,000
so that this would not be necessary.

As to the practicability of such a device, it might be said tnat J.P. Kulik
spent 20 years in constructing a table of primes up to 100,000,000 and when
finished it was found to contain so many errors that it was not worth
publishing. The macnine described here could probably be made to handle 5
numbers per second so that the table would require only about 2 months to
construct. "

i am always amazed at the idea of tables of useful figures being a limited
resource, think tycho brahe or log tables

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sullyj3
Ironic to write in binary a number which is only significant in decimal.

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ctdavies
"The thesis melded George Boole’s nineteenth-century Boolean algebra (based on
the variables true and false, denoted by the binary one and zero)"

I just have to complain about this clause referring to the values true and
false as "variables"

