[HN Gopher] Shannon's Mind-Reading Machine
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Shannon's Mind-Reading Machine
Author : metadat
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-06-18 22:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (literateprograms.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (literateprograms.org)
| cleansingfire wrote:
| Similar to https://roadtolarissa.com/oracle/
| ElFitz wrote:
| 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.
| tudorw wrote:
| 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.
| tnecniv wrote:
| 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.
| lhuser123 wrote:
| Completely random thought. Maybe some day a mind like Shanon's
| will become obsessed with AI and finally create AGI
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They may need a billion dollar computer to play with :)
| drcongo wrote:
| 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...
| metadat wrote:
| 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.
| grzm wrote:
| 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.
| metadat wrote:
| 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| +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.
| dannylandau wrote:
| Can you provide a link to the article?
|
| I read his biography and would recommend
| --https://a.co/d/84aw1nl
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| 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
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| ithkuil wrote:
| 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?
| tgv wrote:
| The Etruscans read the entrails as well, and look where
| that got them. I don't think there's quite enough
| information to speculate.
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