CLAUDE SHANNON

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.

I am very seldom interested in applications. I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?

I just wondered how things were put together.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.

Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.

I just wondered how things were put together.

Information is the resolution of uncertainty.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.

I am very seldom interested in applications. I am more interested in the elegance of a problem. Is it a good problem, an interesting problem?

My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'