This was the hunch that Shannon had suggested to Hermann Weyl in Princeton in 1939, and which he had spent almost a decade building into theory: Information is stochastic. It is neither fully unpredictable nor fully determined. It unspools in roughly guessable ways. That’s why the classic model of a stochastic process is a drunk man stumbling down the street. He doesn’t walk in the respectably straight line that would allow us to predict his course perfectly.
