The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

Shannon sidestepped this problem by treating the signal as a string of discrete symbols. Now, instead of boosting the power, a sender can overcome noise by using extra symbols for error correction—just as an African drummer makes himself understood across long distances, not by banging the drums harder, but by expanding the verbosity of his discourse. Shannon considered the discrete case to be more fundamental in a mathematical sense as well. And he was considering another point: that treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.