A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

They took it to the casinos, where Thorp and Shannon took turns placing bets. “The division of labor,” Thorp said, “was that Claude stood by the wheel and timed, while I sat at the far end of the layout, unable to see the spinning ball well, and placed bets.” Their wives served as lookouts, “checking to see whether the casino suspected anything and if we were inconspicuous.” Even so, they had some close calls: “Once a lady next to me looked over in horror,” Thorp recalled. “I left the table quickly and discovered the speaker peering from my ear canal like an alien insect.”

“When Galileo wanted to slow gravity down, he just tilted a table” and let a ball roll from one end to the other, said Graham. “Imagine a big table, and then as you tilt the table, you get closer to 1 g.” By sliding pucks up a tilted air hockey table, Shannon was able to study their patterns, and refine his juggling technique, in a kind of slow motion. The pucks’ paths “were not parabolas, just pointy, and you could practice doing that.”

No one, that is, until Claude Shannon. Unmoved by material concerns, freed of the need to burnish his reputation, and driven by curiosity for curiosity’s sake, he could throw himself headlong into the study of juggling without any of the misgivings his colleagues might feel about doing the same.

His juggling theorem stated the following: (F + D) H = (V + D) N F = how long a ball stays in the air D = how long a ball is held in a hand H = number of hands V = how long a hand is empty N = number of balls being juggled

Shannon’s theorem tracks time continuously. As Lewbel put it, “The way the juggler achieves the rhythm in Shannon’s theorem is by trading off time in a continuous way; the more time one ball spends in the air relative to the time it spends in your hand, the more time you have to deal with the other balls, and so the more balls you can juggle. Shannon’s theorem makes this trade off in times precise.” (He also pointed out the irony, given the rest of Shannon’s digital innovations, that the juggling theorem’s measurement of continuous time makes it analog.)

I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.

explore the great ocean of truth.

They will be individuals who are sensitive to their own human fallibility and who thereby hold a deeply rooted reverence for excellence. .

I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan, but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars—Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons and Beethovens whose work continues

“But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”

I have great hopes in this direction for machines that will rival or even surpass the human brain. This area, known as artificial intelligence, has been developing for some thirty or forty years. It is now taking on commercial importance. For example, within a mile of MIT, there are seven different corporations devoted to research in this area, some working on parallel processing. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is my feeling that by 2001 AD we will have machines which can walk as well, see as well, and think as well as we do.

Incidentally, a communication system is not unlike what is happening right here. I am the source and you are the receiver. The translator is the transmitter who is applying a complicated operation to my American message to make it suitable for Japanese ears. This transformation is difficult enough with straight factual material, but becomes vastly more difficult with jokes and double entendres. I could not resist the temptation to include a number of these to put the translator on his mettle. Indeed, I am planning to take a tape of his translation to a second translator, and have it translated back into English.

“Claude was never a person who depended a great deal on memory, because one of the things that made him brilliant was his ability to draw such wonderful conclusions from very, very simple models. What that meant was that, if he was failing a little bit, you wouldn’t notice it.”

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. —Bertrand Russell

“A uniquely playful and gentle American genius,” one writer noted. “Shannon radiated . . . a powerful inherent intellectual light,”

What were those values? Simplicity matters. Elegant math was forceful math. Inessential items, superfluous writing, extra work—all of them should be discarded. In his way of approaching mathematics as an exercise in getting down to the essentials, Shannon produced work that would be regarded as remarkably self-contained, polished, intuitive, and, of course, brilliant—on par with F=ma or E=mc2

“all the advanced signal processing that enables us to send high-speed data was done as an outgrowth of Claude Shannon’s work on information theory,”

He wrote pathbreaking papers, then, unsatisfied with their present state, postponed them indefinitely in favor of more pressing curiosities.

He was passionately curious, but also, at times, unapologetically lazy. He was among the most productive, honored minds of his era, and yet he gave the appearance that he would chuck it all overboard for the chance to tinker in his gadget room.

Courage is one of the things that Shannon had supremely. You have only to think of his major theorem. He wants to create a method of coding, but he doesn’t know what to do so he makes a random code. Then he is stuck. And then he asks the impossible question, “What would the average random code do?” He then proves that the average code is arbitrarily good, and that therefore there must be at least one good code. Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.

think, to the other great hallmark of Shannon’s life: the value of finding joy in work.

STEM courses are the means to job security, not joy. Studying them becomes the academic equivalent of eating your vegetables—something valuable, and state sanctioned, but vaguely distasteful.

Shannon set four goals for artificial intelligence to achieve by 2001: a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, “most important,” a stock-picking program that outperformed the prime rate by 50 percent. “These goals,” he said only half-jokingly, “could mark the beginning of a phase-out of the stupid, entropy-increasing, and militant human race in favor of a more logical, energy conserving, and friendly species—the computer.”