While employed at Bell Labs, he came up with the insight that the problem of communicating through a noisy system, like a phone wire, is almost identical to the process of enciphering and deciphering a message. In other words, according to Shannon, making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption.
