He showed them the sample text strings he had used in The Mathematical Theory of Communication—which few of them had read—and described his “prediction experiment,” in which the subject guesses text letter by letter. He told them that English has a specific entropy, a quantity correlated with redundancy, and that he could use these experiments to compute the number. His listeners were fascinated—Wiener, in particular, thinking of his own “prediction theory.” “My method has some parallelisms to this,” Wiener interrupted. “Excuse me for interrupting.” There was a difference in emphasis between
...more
