Claude Shannon: The Bit Player | Hacker News Reader

Claude Shannon: The Bit Player

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92 pointsmxfh14 comments

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...

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

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

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

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.

Now we deport them when their visa expires.

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

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..?

The Idea Factory was excellent and really delves into the nuance of topics many of us see as black and white (government regulation vs. laissez-faire capitalism, monopolies vs. competition, pure vs. applied research)

The author also does a great job at making his subjects come alive. You really get a feel for the great minds of years past who have often stumbled in the dark before coming up with brilliant theories that we all still rely on.

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

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...

This is also a good read:

http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/claude-shannon-the-las-v...

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

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

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.

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

Unfortunately it would be hard to ask him directly as to why but a good proxy is to listen to one of his colleagues, Richard Hamming explain. https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw. He mentions Claude around the 4:30 mark.

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

Why don't we have that anymore?

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