[HN Gopher] Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and ...
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Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)
Author : xiande04
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-11-03 17:09 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.juggle.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.juggle.org)
| overu589 wrote:
| It's funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a
| long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my
| mind's eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
| pcl wrote:
| Wayback cache url:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle...
|
| And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf):
| https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...
| jjcc wrote:
| One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a
| hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into
| "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with
| the state.
|
| Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became
| professional sport car racer.
|
| It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the
| talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| I've watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his
| view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but
| many high IQ ppl can't ,,refocus" it easily and aren't doing
| well in life.
| FredPret wrote:
| A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels.
|
| It's a statistical measure comparing the test taker against
| the average, much like percentiles.
|
| At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170's I think, the
| expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
|
| If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a
| breakthrough for the ages), then we could say "A is twice as
| smart as B" and award A twice the points of B. In such a
| system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
|
| EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use
| the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a
| proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to
| answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than
| nothing.
| naveen99 wrote:
| It's close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above
| mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12
| billion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_ru
| l...
| FredPret wrote:
| Sure, but we can't say someone has a 1-in-12B
| intelligence when we only have 8B (or whatever) people.
| We can only go as high as 1-in-<current_pop>
| willvarfar wrote:
| we can compare their intelligence to those who have
| previously lived?
|
| A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have
| ever been born.
|
| So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever,
| you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
| jll29 wrote:
| I was thinking along similar lines, bit it becomes a
| theoretical question when you cannot
| test/evaluate/interact with subjects anymore.
|
| Also, I'm wondering whether a difference of 1 IQ point is
| even noticeable, and if not, what's the smallest
| _noticeable_ increment or faction of a unit.
| FredPret wrote:
| A difference in 1 IQ point in the 100-101 range might be
| a difference in absolute problem-solving ability of x
| units, while than the difference between 170-171 is y
| units.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Matter of perspective; one in the 100~150 billion sapiens
| (or more) that have gone before and the rates go up. It's
| also possible rates are underestimated, as we have only
| tested a relatively small sample compared to N=all
| FredPret wrote:
| If we test every living human, we can figure out who is
| the very smartest one. That person has a
| 1-in-<current_pop> intelligence, from which we can
| calculate their IQ. That IQ is nowhere near 200.
|
| It would be handy to have standardized test answers from
| every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point
| out.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| >EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could
| use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved
| as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is
| to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better
| than nothing.
|
| Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain
| size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent
| correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's
| not _that_ consistent. Some brains just work better for
| their size.
| FredPret wrote:
| That's why it'll be a proxy that will get better over
| time as AI architectures converge towards optimality.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Intelligence is such a multi-faceted thing that is seems
| ridiculous to try to reduce it to a single measure and I am
| highly suspicious of any that tries to do so.
| lqet wrote:
| Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about
| Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of
| "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease
| in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They
| continue:
|
| > In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the
| Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she
| "actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate
| school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember
| being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I
| was thinking about, I was like, 'Wow, even in his compromised
| state he still has that ability.'"
|
| So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to
| be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing"
| Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape
| and barely coherent. Yet there is an _article_ about him from
| 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to
| juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and
| about information theory:
|
| > "My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said,
| "was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy
| channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about
| a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to
| thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about
| all these broader applications."
|
| [0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-
| terms-w...
|
| [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-
| prankster-...
| diggan wrote:
| Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with
| Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of
| moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were
| mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and
| seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours
| later, being back in the state of utter confusion.
|
| Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time
| would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger
| contrast.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer's could
| be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent?
| Like maybe Alzheimer's would sort of... drop him into
| conversations without context, but then he'd work out the
| context and try to give advice anyway?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Sounds like a good-natured genius's way to handle that kind
| of scenario to me, FWIW
| taeric wrote:
| Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where
| you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia
| can take that away, as well; but often people notice people
| with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them
| in the now.
|
| As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my
| father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk
| to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let
| them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make
| sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a
| context I just wasn't in.
| akira2501 wrote:
| My grandfather had Alzheimer's. I visited him in the nursing
| home. He mistook me for his late brother, and presumed that
| we were about to go on a trip, that he had already taken
| decades ago, to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
|
| I didn't know what to do so I just played along with it. We
| spent the next hour having the most in depth and amazing
| conversation about the history of hist Baseball experiences
| from his youth. He remembered nearly everything from that
| period of his life and we discussed it in exceptional detail.
|
| I walked away both elated that we could have that moment and
| incredibly sad that most victims of this disease seem
| entirely trapped within it. They're still in there. They're
| still that same person.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in
| the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis.
| To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably
| just incorrect, relatively speaking.
| Toothies wrote:
| Well, my grandmother had dementia.
|
| Her illness progressed very quickly in the sense that it only
| took her about a year for her to regress into an infant
| mentally. She spent about 10 - 13 years in bed screaming like
| a child.
|
| My point being that dementia can progress quickly, but you
| can still live with it for a long time (if you are unlucky
| enough). We, as in her family, spent years hoping she would
| die, while she spent years suffering.
| prophesi wrote:
| Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those
| interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their
| pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
|
| [0] https://thebitplayer.com/
| graemep wrote:
| Loved that film.
|
| I particularly liked the idea that he is one of the most
| important figures in science/tech/maths that most people have
| not heard of.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those
| two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or
| dead, would you most like to have a meal with?"
|
| I'm nearly always met with "Who..??"
| dmd wrote:
| My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great.
| (Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT
| Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
| nemesis17 wrote:
| Our 3.5 friend was named after him.
| brap wrote:
| I honestly thought this was a new Claude model before clicking
| the link.
| docdeek wrote:
| > Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler...
|
| I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul
| Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his
| mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president
| of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the
| book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math
| idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
| jasonhong wrote:
| Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker
| article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-
| technology/claude-s...):
|
| He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee.
| He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent
| moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-
| intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed
| the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to "On" and a box opens
| up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to
| "Off" and retreats inside the box.
| warner25 wrote:
| My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his
| revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his
| actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of
| unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten.
| As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) --
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 --
| https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind,
| this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they
| worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.
| jeifneioka wrote:
| Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low
| hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything
| in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in
| that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had
| "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs
| nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people
| working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
| alberto_ol wrote:
| previous submission 7 years ago
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016
| kaycebasques wrote:
| From what I read in _The Dream Machine_ , Shannon sounded like a
| super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype
| of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
| jll29 wrote:
| I'm still reading it, but apparently he stopped talking to his
| own mother forever after she refused to give him a cookie
| intended for guests.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Finally, a human being brave enough to take cookies as
| seriously as they deserve.
| jtimdwyer wrote:
| In my experience many mathematicians enjoy things like juggling,
| change ringing etc. make of it what you will I guess.
| jll29 wrote:
| Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was
| established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in
| 1973."
|
| That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after
| yourself.
|
| - Turing never won the Turing Award.
|
| - Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
|
| - Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC
| Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death
| to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people
| who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the
| "AI Overview" were:
|
| Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for
| Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her
| novel A Spell of Winter
|
| Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The
| Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after
| her.
|
| Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The
| award was named after him after his death in 1999.
|
| Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop
| Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to
| have an award named after them.
|
| Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing
| spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large
| amounts of digital data
|
| The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are
| legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it
| turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one
| time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept
| giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton
| case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift
| case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it
| out.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| Also Poet: https://cmrr-
| star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pd...
|
| ( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell
| https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon
| ideas )
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| Feynman as well
| CSMastermind wrote:
| For anyone interested in the math of juggling here's a Youtube
| playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmCXbh-
| zw61C7jR2YofYx...
|
| It's a fasincating topic that had far more complexity than I
| initially expected.
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