3 ms·

It's a fascinating read IMO. The book edition starts with introductory notes by Warren Weaver that really drive the point of how broadly applicable Shannon's th

It's a fascinating read IMO. The book edition starts with introductory notes by Warren Weaver that really drive the point of how broadly applicable Shannon's theory is: "The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior. In some connections, it may be desirable to use a still broader definition of communication, namely, one which would include the procedures by means of which one mechanism (say automatic equipment to track an airplane and to compute its probable future positions) affects another mechanism (say a guided missile chasing this airplane)." You can also tell this was written around war times.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
Not a surprise. The entire fields of system theory, control theory (previously known as cybernetics), information theory and computing were originally developed with heavily influence from wartime problems, especially fire-control problems. Early fire control computers in WW2 were their earliest large-scale computers in practical use. Early torpedoes had control loop stability problems that can make them oscillate up and down between the programmed depth, which needed insights on control theory to solve. Same for information theory, cryptography was the driving force, see Bletchley Park. Also, one closely related result by Shannon was an analysis of cryptography and ciphers, see Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon [0], written in 1945 and remained classified until 1949. In this paper, Shannon proved the security properties of One-Time Pad. Also, the NSA made a digital computer in 1943 in Project SIGSALY. The computer itself was an engineering accomplishment, but even more, the system was the first implementation of digital audio in PCM, with its own audio encoding algorithm for compression. [0] http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

Not a surprise. The entire fields of system theory, control theory (previously known as cybernetics), information theory and computing were originally developed with heavily influence from wartime problems, especially fire-control problems. Early fire control computers in WW2 were their earliest large-scale computers in practical use. Early torpedoes had control loop stability problems that can make them oscillate up and down between the programmed depth, which needed insights on control theory to solve. Same for information theory, cryptography was the driving force, see Bletchley Park. Also, one closely related result by Shannon was an analysis of cryptography and ciphers, see Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon [0], written in 1945 and remained classified until 1949. In this paper, Shannon proved the security properties of One-Time Pad. Also, the NSA made a digital computer in 1943 in Project SIGSALY. The computer itself was an engineering accomplishment, but even more, the system was the first implementation of digital audio in PCM, with its own audio encoding algorithm for compression. [0] http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf