A Mind at Play, book review: The life and work of information theory’s founding father

A mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the advice Age • by means of Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman • Simon & Schuster • ISBN: 978-1-4767-6668-3 • 366 pages • $ 27

think about a drunk stumbling down the highway. We can not predict precisely when or in what path they will stumble, but it surely doesn’t take long for us to be capable of predict with a high degree of accuracy where they are trying to head. we can additionally predict with some confidence that if there are lamp posts along the route, the inebriated will seemingly navigate towards them.

here is one of the vital analogies Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman use to clarify tips concept in A intellect at Play, the unbelievable new biography of assistance age founder Claude Shannon. Like all of the most beneficial science writing, their rationalization of Shannon’s groundbreaking work is a deceptively essential examine. What they are explaining is the basis of the communications we every engage in day by day: the way to transmit information efficiently and precisely even when noise makes it intricate.

like the inebriated, our use of language might also look unpredictable, but each and every letter we add restricts additional what we are able to say next. This fact underlies every thing we do with counsel — transmit it across the world by way of telecommunications, encrypt it, compress it, save it, and predict it, as your smartphone does anytime you start to category a textual content or electronic mail. considered as a question of the structure of advice, the authors write, our “freedom of speech” is an illusion: most of our options have already been eliminated.

A lively and curious intellect

From a extremely young age, as the authors clarify, Shannon displayed a lively and curious mind. proficient as each an electrical engineer and a mathematician, he spent his career at Bell Labs and MIT, each places where he was free to explore whatever thing involved him. about the first half of the e-book covers his existence unless his early thirties, when his most vital work become carried out. As Soni and Goodman notice, mathematics, like sports, is a youngster’s video game. anyway his mathematical concept of conversation, all through that time, he additionally laid the groundwork for modern signal processing and critical features of cryptography (such because the one-time pad). ultra-modern uses of his work wouldn’t have stunned him: in 1984 he recommended that by using 2001 a computer would turn into world chess champion (it took place in 1997).

Shannon’s later experiments with solving puzzles — constructing digital objects, mulling the way to construct a chess-enjoying computing device, learning juggling, devising a Roman numeral calculator — pointed the way ahead. One such changed into a system that taught an digital mouse (which he called “Theseus”) the way to navigate a maze. The mouse behaves a whole lot like a Roomba does nowadays, hitting a wall and altering route to are attempting once again, however the computer researching system at the back of it is smarter, as it remembers the relevant course, discarding the error. one of the crucial pleasures of up to date biography-analyzing is that once the authors point out Shannon’s filmed 1950 demonstration of Theseus at Bell Labs, possible pause to find it on YouTube. regrettably, with the aid of the early Nineteen Nineties, when Shannon’s work was taking up the area, Alzheimer’s ailment prevented him from appreciating it.

Of route that you can use the web devoid of realizing any of Shannon’s work. however, because the authors explain, there’s price in figuring out how the technologies we use daily came. This outstanding biography is a pretty good location to start.

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