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Shannon's Mind-Reading Machine

literateprograms.org

51 pointsmetadat17 comments

As part of the context, consider that RAND was (in 1950) studying how applicable game theory might be to nuclear deterrence, and in order to effectively run a mixed strategy, one wants to unpredictably[0] swap out pure strategies. Shannon's 1953 machine could be considered an argument that if one is deciding the fate of humanity via mixed strategy, one might wish to access a larger entropy pool than typical human whim[1].

(there is also an idea that making bronze-age military decisions by reading entrails of sacrificed animals may have had some non-placebo effect, less due to currying favour with the god nominally sacrificed to, and more with satisfying Eris by adding to that army's effective entropy pool)

[0] Agassi was infamously able to defeat Becker's serve because he had noticed a strong correlation between tongue position and type of service; one bit of information (wide vs. not-wide) at that level of tennis was a valuable edge.

[1] there are worse mistakes than insufficient entropy for a mixed strategy; one might have a reasonable pure strategy, but fail to publicly commit to it, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLQCwVkhFvM

I would think that the entrails reading was heavily biased towards whatever the army leader wanted, much in the same way that Hans the horse could "do math" by watching its trainer.

I read that generals did pressure hauruspices eventually to provide the desired reading but often the process introduced an unpredictable delay. Perhaps that's enough?

The Etruscans read the entrails as well, and look where that got them. I don't think there's quite enough information to speculate.

Claude Shannon is an incredible beast of a mind.

A few years back I was wondering about how different methods of communicating information (eg dna, the human ear, speech, radio,…) could be compared.

At the same time, nautilus published an article on him, by pure coincidence. And I somehow landed on it, by accident.

It was truly mind blowing. These questions and their answers had been thoroughly, systematically, explored, described, and laid bare.

After years of scorning mathematics, it gave me a renewed interest for them, just so I could get a better understanding.

The applications are just so vast.

And yet, depressingly enough, it is often difficult to share this enthusiasm with most.

If you've not read it, I think you'd enjoy The Information by James Gleick [0] - lots of it touches on these points, and Shannon obviously figures heavily. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information%3A_A_History%2...

Thanks for the cool recommendation! It looks like James Gleick has written a couple of other interesting books, namely:

"Chaos: Making a New Science"

and

"Time Travel"

p.s. you've inspired me to start keeping track of interesting HN search filters, for example- book recommendations.

https://github.com/sleaze/hn-search-filters

I know I've forgotten some interesting ones, hence this effort to organize.

From a newbie on the subject, I really enjoyed Chaos. It’s prompted a further book-buying and research spree :) Pairs well with The Information, I think.

Thanks! Btw, really like your profile. I've started linking and snapshotting the good ones @ https://github.com/sleaze/hn-search-filters, so many good nuggets of wisdom amongst a great deal of noise.

If you find it creepy or don't like it please let me know and I'll purge completely from the repository history.

+1 for The Information - a great book.

Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, Genius is also excellent. And Chaos and Time Travel: A History, although the latter looks at the subject from literary and philosophical perspectives as well as science.

Pair with Darwin Among the Machines and Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson.

Can you provide a link to the article?

I read his biography and would recommend --https://a.co/d/84aw1nl

Sure! Sorry I forgot. Can't edit anymore.

https://nautil.us/how-information-got-re_invented-236738/

Completely random thought. Maybe some day a mind like Shanon’s will become obsessed with AI and finally create AGI

They may need a billion dollar computer to play with :)

I strongly feel we are missing a layer, a bridge between academic and applied, I know that it happens, more of it would be good, once I go digging in the archives of science I become very aware of how much we lose or are unable to act on.

He maybe has the best masters thesis of all time. I truly believe he’s the best engineer of all time, and, even if you dispute that, he’s on the Mount Rushmore.

Turing was allegedly working on his version of information theory or at least the early stages of it, but he met Shannon at Bell Labs and thought he already solved it satisfactorily, and moved on to a new topic.

Shannon’s original paper on Information Theory is also incredibly readable and doesn’t require much background.

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