From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Telmo Menezes
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2015 12:06 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Food for thought
On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 11:57 PM, John Mikes <[email protected]> wrote:
Telmo, pls. tellme:
what should we call 'information'?
I agree with John Clark's definition. If you ask for a definition of
"surprise", I think that can be formalized too. Surprise is inversely
proportional to the performance of the best possible algorithm at predicting
the next choice from a sequence of previous choices. One million zeros in a row
contain very little information, while one million bits of white noise contain
the maximum amount of information that can be stored in one million bits.
I agree on some level; however in the case of the one million zero bits I would
argue that in the context of the given query or search this result may be the
precise information that is desired and the noise bits are rejected by the
query because the query is searching for that the maximum zero bit sequence
(that in the particular information domain would carry some significance). What
I am pointing out is that without knowledge of the domain and the significance
of a bit being on or off it is hard to discern or make statements about any
sequence of bits. Sure we can make mathematical statements about the inherent
complexity of the sequence (as you correctly did) but without knowing the
representational context does this really give us that much insight into the
potential content in the “message”?
if Brent takes a picture, is it - O N E - info only, or as many as re composed
to be included in his picture? That would be zillions, depending how you count
them.
If you give me the file produced by Brent's camera, I can use information
entropy to give you an upper limit on the amount of information that can be
extracted from it. I can't tell you what the n possibilities are, but I can
estimate and upper bound for n. If Brent compresses the file by degrading
quality, n goes down. If he turns it to black and white, n goes down, and so on.
True. But remember that the photograph does not exist in isolation; it will
become indexed, associated and otherwise decorated by computer generated
contextual meta-information. Many copies of the original digital photograph
will be made (at many different levels of compression and scale – thumbnails
for example). Some of these copies will very likely reside in NSA data centers
(and other government slurping datacenters operated, especially in the UK,
Canada and Australia); other copies will exist in various corporate datacenters
depending on how the picture is used. In all of these instances of the photo
extra layers of metadata and associative and indexing data will be generated.
On the physical level of storage, transmission, copying etc. all of this
“information” exists, consuming physical and energy resources. It has a real
physical and energy existence somewhere.
Is it useful information? Depends who you ask.
We are nowhere in identifying the terms we use in communication.
I think the difficulty here is not so much in defining the concept of
information itself, but in understanding how information interacts with
computation.
In the domain I work in information is anything that is stored, transmitted
etc. Information is just bits. There is no assertion about the value or merit
of the information; this is a different discussion actually. A completely
random stream of bits that gets stored and transmitted and moved around,
chunked up into packets etc.; fed through algorithms etc. is still information
in the sense that it is something that exists and can be copied and processed
in many different ways. It may be information of absolutely no value with no
meaning, but to the systems storing, transmitting and otherwise processing the
stream it still represents content
For example: If I send you the sequence of characters "Eiffel Tower" you will
picture the eiffel tower in your mind. This works because I have extra
information that allows me to make an educated guess on the contents of your
brain and explore the regularity -- this is what language is. If I broadcast
the same sequence of characters to outer space, aliens will not be able to
infer the shape of the Eiffel Tower from this piece of information. But we can
approximate the information content of the shape of the Eiffel Tower by trying
to find the smallest possible photo or drawing (in file size) that can convey
the shape.
You (and I and most people who have ever been to Paris or seen pictures of
Paris) have an Eiffel Tower analogue embedded in our memory. When we see a
picture of the Eiffel Tower we immediately recognize it as our minds recall our
Eiffel Tower analogue in our memory – in some sense then what we experience is
the interleaved interplay of what we are looking at and what our minds are
recalling. Information rarely exists without being embedded in a context.
Chris
Telmo.
JM
On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 1:24 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Telmo Menezes
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2015 12:22 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Food for thought
On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 6:36 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/17/2015 11:56 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
Current global growth estimates are that every two days, the world is now
creating as much new digital information as all the data ever created from the
dawn of humans through the current century. It has been estimated that by 2020,
the size of the world’s digital universe will be close to 44 trillion gigabytes
If I take a picture with my smartphone is that counted as "creating
information"?
I suspect it is, but we must remember that not everything that can be counted
counts.
What about the masterpiece that nobody ever sees, hears or reads? I am sure
many great works of thought have been utterly lost and many more have never
been experienced outside of the brains of their creators. Perhaps some
fundamental theoretical work is even now languishing in utter obscurity. Is
this “creating information” or does “creating information” depend on it
becoming consumed (and entangled with other streams of information)?
Chris
Telmo.
Brent
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