BINARY digit or bit is a basic unit of information used in computing and digital communications.
The invention of bit allows us to quantify the amount of information in a message; explore the probabilistic “rules” that make our messages and languages more or less predictable; and show how we could use digital codes to transmit messages with perfect accuracy.
The person behind[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ] this invention is Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as the father of information theory. Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper,
A Mathematical Theory of Communication, explained how all systems for sending and receiving information have the same basic structure.
This work focuses on the problem of how best to encode the information a sender wants to transmit. In this fundamental work, he used tools in probability theory, developed by Norbert
Wiener, which were in their nascent stages of being applied to communication theory at that time.
Shannon developed information entropy as a measure of the uncertainty in a message while essentially inventing the field of information theory.
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