

Claude Shannon -why prefer the bit to the dit, nit and Hartley? - mikejuk
http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/351-claude-shannon.html

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schemer
Father of Information Theory is a little-known character ? I think not. His
master thesis is the "most significant masters thesis in the 20th century".

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KonaB
Shannon is only a _little-known character_ if one has been stranded on a
desert island for the last 70 years, without any contact with the rest of the
world...

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igrekel
Sadly that applies to a lot of the general population, I would say it even
apply to several people having a degree or working in fields related to
computer science.

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KonaB
Maybe this is due to the fact that Shannon's work is quite theoretical. Sure,
his work had an immense impact, but it's "behind the curtains", so to say. The
point I am trying to make is that Coding is an _enabling technology_ , i.e.,
it serves to enable reliable communication, but it's a means towards an end,
not an end in itself. A lot of people think communication is about two
antennas and something floating around in the air is transmitted between them,
and somehow the receiver is able to guess the message that the transmitter
sent. Well, the transmitter can do that because of coding schemes, but that's
too technical for most people.

Another field which suffers from the same problem is Controls. It's also an
_enabling technology_ in the sense that it allows man-made mechanisms and
devices to work as desired. Most people think airplanes fly because they have
wings, when in fact they fly because they have controls.

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iamwil
I wished the article went more into why decimal pales in comparison to binary.
Is it because hardware components are easier to build and more reliable with
two states instead of 10?

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alan-crowe
The question of whether hardware components are easier to build and more
reliable with two states instead of ten is more subtle than it appears. In the
early days the appropriate princples for building hardware were in flux
requiring co-desigh of software (number base) and hardward. I'm particularly
remembering the decatron: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron>. The
comparison is between doing binary with triodes and doing decimal with
triodes, dekatrons and anything else you might invent. Is binary really better
or have you merely failed to invent a suitable tube?

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jgrahamc
Shannon's "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" is hardly a
'paper'. It's a thesis towards Shannon's MSc.

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KonaB
And the thesis can be found here: <http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11173>

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juvenn
Thanks for letting me know more bits about Prof. Shannon's works, they are
just ... beautiful

