Understanding Management

by Phyllis C Davenport

Understanding as a model Gregory Chaitin, a noted computer scientist, propounds a view that comprehension is a kind of data compression. In his essay "The Limits of Reason", he argues thatunderstanding something means being able to figure out a simple set of rules that explains it. For example, we understand why day and night exist because we have a simplemodel—the rotation of the earth—that explains a tremendous amount of data—changes in brightness, temperature, and atmospheric composition of the earth. We have compressed a large amount of information by using a simple model that predicts it. Similarly, we understand the number 0.33333... by thinking of it as one-third. The first way of representing the number requires an infinite amount of memory; but the second way can produce all the data of the first representation, but uses much less information. Chaitin argues that comprehension is this ability to compress data.

162 pages, Paperback

Published December 13, 2014