This highly abstract description had practical weight for scientists trying to decide between different strategies of controlling error. In particular, it meant that, instead of trying to increase signal strength to drown out more and more noise, engineers should settle for a modest signal, accept the inevitability of errors and use a strategy of redundancy to catch and correct them. Mandelbrot also changed the way IBM’s engineers thought about the cause of noise. Bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere. But Mandelbrot’s scaling
...more
