Claude Shannon Turns 1100100
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
edit: giving Bardeen & Brattain their due.
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."
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!
I suppose we can rely on context to choose the correct interpretation, as Shannon is unlikely to have been born 294,976 years ago or 28 years in the future.
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!
Oh damn, that must have been tough to find!
The days of the 6-bit register or the 18 or 36 bit words are gone, dust beneath the heels of the conquering hordes of the 8008 microprocessor heirs.
So I prefer if you break up binary numbers on either 4 or 8 bit boundaries with a space and leading zeroes, as is very common in hex editors. So I'd have written either 01100100 or 0110 0100, either of which would be easier to interpret.
It feels more natural to my taste. We already use #1, #2, ...
there are a number of areas of inquiry where using 1100100 is more appropriate than 01100100
and considering here it is being used to represent an age, one would have to show a spec on ages represented in binary to determine what 'standard' is
[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]
I feel lucky and proud to have studied his work, through the lens of signals and systems, at his Alma Mater, University of Michigan.
Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/claude-shannon-t...
http://www.google.com/doodles/claude-shannons-100th-birthday
It seems odd to end at a conference he showed up to once.
investigating line noise was also a part of mandelbrot's revelation on self similarity
i recommend reading it
(o) http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/34541425...
" 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
I just have to complain about this clause referring to the values true and false as "variables"