On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 9:37 PM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *> His* [Shannon's] *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. * > OK that is a valid point because Shannon says information can be thought of as a measure of surprise and if there are only 7 possibilities rather than 26 then there is less surprise when you see each new letter, however you were wrong when you said Shannon would not realize that tamaontietoa is information. > *> Incidentally "tama on tietoa" is Finnish for "this is information".* > I knew nothing about Finnish except that it is one of the very few languages spoken in Europe, along with Hungarian and Basque, that is not Indo-European; so I used Google to confirm that you are right, "tama on tietoa" does indeed mean "this is information". I was surprised when you told me that, I didn't know it before so Shannon would say you gave me one bit of new information, and thanks to that extra bit of information I was able to conclude that Finnish requires not 7 but at least 8 characters, 7 letters and the space character, because neither Google nor Bard had any idea what "tamaontietoa" meant. I can also conclude that "tamaontietoa" is NOT Finnish, although I can't rule out the possibility that it is Martian. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> inf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1nVfYkPhEG7oyNYvYA7i_3KDZB1_xOW3a959OGv6jpsA%40mail.gmail.com.
