“Up until that time, everyone thought that communication was involved in trying to find ways of communicating written language, spoken language, pictures, video, and all of these different things—that all of these would require different ways of communicating,” said Shannon’s colleague Robert Gallager. “Claude said no, you can turn all of them into binary digits. And then you can find ways of communicating the binary digits.” You can code any message as a stream of bits, without having to know where it will go; you can transmit any stream of bits, efficiently and reliably, without having to
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