On 1/21/2024 5:40 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 7:03 PM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>> /If I write "tamaontietoa" is it information or gibberish?
Is it about something? /
>> There's no reason it couldn't be both, Shannon would say it's
definitely information,
/>No he wouldn't./
Of course Shannon would say "tamaontietoa" contains information, and
he can even tell you how much. There are 26 letters in the alphabet so
5 bits, 2^5, is more than enough to specify a letter, there are 12
letters in your example so"tamaontietoa" contains 60 bits of information.
No. Since 5 bits is /more than enough/, you've only show that it
contains /less than 60 bits/.
Personally I don't think the information that tamaontietoacontains is
very interesting but that's just me, Shannon makes no value judgments.
You have apparently never read Shannon. His measure of information
is/relative to a channel /and depends on the counterfactual number of
messages that could be sent. You're presuming that each letter could
have been one of 25 other letters. But there are only seven different
letters in "tamaontietoa" so maybe only 3 bits are needed for each one.
And maybe in this language "m" is always preceded and followed by "a" so
there are only 10 symbols in the message instead of 12. And so on. You
surely know that English is about 50% redundant; an estimate that
Shannon himself made. So it turns out you have to know the channel to
calculate the information.
Incidentally "tama on tietoa" is Finnish for "this is information".
Brent
> /Shannon information is relative to the possible messages. /
Yes, and there are 26^12 possible 12 letter strings, and
tamaontietoais one of them.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
21e
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