OgreMkV
Posts: 3668
Joined: Oct. 2009
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| Quote | The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a concise language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., "a", "the", "I") should be shorter than less common words (e.g., "roundabout", "generation", "mediocre",) so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Second, if part of a sentence is unheard or misheard due to noise — e.g., a passing car — the listener should still be able to glean the meaning of the underlying message. Such robustness is as essential for an electronic communication system as it is for a language; properly building such robustness into communications is done by channel coding. Source coding and channel coding are the fundamental concerns of information theory.
Note that these concerns have nothing to do with the importance of messages.
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Notice that last sentence?
Also note that it is specifically mentioned that 'meaning' is divorced from the actual information content.
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Ignored by those who can't provide evidence for their claims.
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