In a way, that was already evident enough: saying the same thing twice in a noisy room is a way of adding redundancy, on the unstated assumption that the same error is unlikely to attach itself to the same place two times in a row. For Shannon, though, there was much more. Our linguistic predictability, our congenital failure to maximize information, is actually our best protection from error. A few pages ago, recall, you read that the structure of our language denies us total freedom to choose “the next letter and the next pineapple.” As soon as you reached “pineapple”—really, as soon as you
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