Von Neumann was a friend and colleague of Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory (mathematical theory of communication). Back then, it was a really s

Von Neumann was a friend and colleague of Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory (mathematical theory of communication). Back then, it was a really small world of scientists working in this field. Von Neumann, Turing, and Shannon spent a lot of time complimenting each other's work. Shannon eventually discovered that information encoding/decoding is optimally done as a collection of bits (the name was later coined by John Archibald Wheeler "it from bit"). At some point Shannon recommended to Turing that his machine could be whittled down to only two states. Von Neumann was inspired by Turing's work, which led him to create the Von Neumann architecture. Von Neumann was brilliant but he relied heavily on Shannon and Turing, and vice versa. And to answer your question... Shannon wrote a paper on that very subject out of deep admiration of his friend Von Neumann. https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.bams/1183522376 https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.bams/1183522...