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Claude E. Shannon Dead at 85

Posted by michael on from the no-funny-comment-here dept.

Multics writes "It is with considerable sadness I report the death of the parent of Information Theory -- Claude Shannon. Here is his obituary over at Bell Labs. He was 85."

5 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. For the mathematically minded... by Uri · · Score: 4

    ...check out Shannon's classic 1948 paper "A mathemtical theory of communication". It is available in postscript (460 Kb), gzipped postscript (146 Kb), and PDF (358 Kb) formats, here on the Bell-Labs site. Warning, though: it's 55 pages, including 7 appendices.

    1. Re:For the mathematically minded... by ch-chuck · · Score: 4

      Another important idea is his application of Boolean algebra to switching circuits - as in this paper - "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits".

      --
      try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  2. Chess by thycotic · · Score: 4
    This guy truly was quite revolutionary in his thinking regarding chess playing! I am currently developing some chess playing software ... during my research I was astounded by the fact that his theories in this field are still the cornerstone of the game playing behind most modern chess programs!

    The IBM Deep Blue site mentions him ...
    http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/meet/html/d.3 .3a.html

  3. You cannot "prove" software by localroger · · Score: 4
    Why is it that programmers feel that they are somehow above the need for these techniques?

    Because these techniques don't exist. This was proven by Alan Turing in his paper Computable Numbers. The only way to "prove" a piece of software is to run it.

    Oh, you're probably thinking of things like OO and top-down and all those gimmicks they teach in CS courses. Well, sometimes those techniques help you write better code (at a cost) and sometimes they make you write worse code (because of the costs).

    Top-down, for example, makes sense when you have 100 programmers doing the software for a bank. It makes no sense at all and results in inferior code and user interfaces when you have 1 or 2 guys writing code for a PLC.

    A line pops into my head from Greg Bear's book Eon. A character from a civilization 1,200 years advanced beyond ours is explaining to a contemporary person why they still have conflict. To paraphrase, there are limited resources and even very wise and educated people will inevitably come to have different ideas about how to solve problems. Each will want to use the limited resources in his way, because he believes it is the best way. Thus there is conflict.

    This is why the language, OS, and technique wars will always be with us. What works in a palm does not work on a desktop, neither works in a PLC, and none of those things works for an enterprise server. And human beings are still subtle and complex enough compared to machines that attacking a problem of the right scale as an "art" will produce superior results.

    --
    Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
  4. Old scientists never die... by gattaca · · Score: 5

    ...they just descend into a state of increasing disorder.