He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.
My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or dead, would you most like to have a meal with?"
My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great.
(Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue:
> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”
So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:
> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."
Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia can take that away, as well; but often people notice people with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them in the now.
As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.
My grandfather had Alzheimer's. I visited him in the nursing home. He mistook me for his late brother, and presumed that we were about to go on a trip, that he had already taken decades ago, to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
I didn't know what to do so I just played along with it. We spent the next hour having the most in depth and amazing conversation about the history of hist Baseball experiences from his youth. He remembered nearly everything from that period of his life and we discussed it in exceptional detail.
I walked away both elated that we could have that moment and incredibly sad that most victims of this disease seem entirely trapped within it. They're still in there. They're still that same person.
I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?
Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion.
Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis. To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably just incorrect, relatively speaking.
Her illness progressed very quickly in the sense that it only took her about a year for her to regress into an infant mentally. She spent about 10 - 13 years in bed screaming like a child.
My point being that dementia can progress quickly, but you can still live with it for a long time (if you are unlucky enough). We, as in her family, spent years hoping she would die, while she spent years suffering.
Average life expectancy for someone with Alzheimer's is 5.8 years [0], so Shannon's couldn't really have been quickly progressing unless he was diagnosed extremely early.
I remember when my mom got it, I did a bunch of research and figured out that she probably only had about 3 more years of okayish memory and a decent quality of life, and then maybe 5 more years after that until death. That stuff depends on age and gender, and my mom was young so I think those numbers are even shorter for someone who is old and male like Shannon. There is of course plenty of variability and some people live decades with it.
So yeah, doesn't sound like "very quick" progression. But if your baseline is a healthy adult aging normally, it would still seem very quick compared to that, I guess.
> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler...
I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
Just want to say, I recognised your name immediately when I saw it. Saw a talk you gave at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury back in 2010 when I was a teenager and it is still, to this day, one of the best popular mathematics talks I've ever witnessed (obviously helped by the immense juggling talent).
I've gone on to do a PhD in Physics and write lots of popular science for some big YouTube channels (SciShow, Veritasium) and among some of the more long term influences on my career I definitely count your talk as one of them!
That's very kind ... thank you ... and excellent that you are carrying on the task of making science accessible.
Keep it up!
PS: I see from the data you've put on the site formerly (and to be honest, still) known as Twitter that I pass reasonably close to you sporadically and irregularly, but every month or so on average. If you'd like to meet for coffee[0] and cake at some point, my contact details are in my profile.
From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973."
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were:
Helen Dunmore
The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.
Walter Payton
Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.
Taylor Swift
Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.
Stuart Parkin
Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data
The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state.
Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.
A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels.
It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles.
At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
Don't forget you also have to divide by two (so, 1 in 24 billion) if you only want to consider the upper end of the range, since that number is essentially "fraction of the population that doesn't fall within mean +/- 6.5 stdev".
That sounds wrong. Perhaps you're confusing frequency with likelihood?
IQ is standardised so that population scores on a standard test have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. It's possible to obtain this with as fewer than 100 people, distributed as:
* One "genius" who scores 200
* One "dumbass" who scores 0
* 87 "everyman" who score 100.
The mean here is clearly 100, and the variance is sqrt(20000/89) = 14.99.
Of course this is very contrived and doesn't look much like a Bell curve in the first place. But with say a million people it wouldn't take much to come up with a more realistic looking example.
Matter of perspective; one in the 100~150 billion sapiens (or more) that have gone before and the rates go up. It's also possible rates are underestimated, as we have only tested a relatively small sample compared to N=all
If we test every living human, we can figure out who is the very smartest one. That person has a 1-in-<current_pop> intelligence, from which we can calculate their IQ. That IQ is nowhere near 200.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
A difference in 1 IQ point in the 100-101 range might be a difference in absolute problem-solving ability of x units, while than the difference between 170-171 is y units.
>EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.
Intelligence is such a multi-faceted thing that is seems ridiculous to try to reduce it to a single measure and I am highly suspicious of any that tries to do so.
He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.