Anyone in IT will have heard of Alan Turing and Tim Berners-Lee. The majority of developers will know about Ada Lovelace. But what about Claude Shannon? Well, I have to admit that I didn’t until I had time to watch the documentary film The Bit Player. I am shocked I’d never come across Shannon’s name before, given the importance of his work.

So what did he do? Well, Claude was responsible for Information Theory, which some people will have heard of. His MIT thesis set the foundations for Boolean algebra and the use of switches to manage data. He published a couple of really important papers in the 1940s. The most important of these is the Mathematical Theory of Communication put forward a number of ideas:

• All means of communication can be reduced to a logical representation:

• Representation of information using bits
• To optimize communication, we should compress data – and compression allows us to reduce the data to just enough before it becomes unintelligible. This is best illustrated by the fact we can write messages and omit characters and sometimes whole words and still be understood.
• We can use mathematical formulas to determine and correct data corruption due to noise – using techniques such as checksums and error correction.
• There is an upper limit to how much information can be communicated – now referred to as Shannon’s limit

While this may seem obvious today, in the 1940s, computers were still electromechanical – making it groundbreaking. Claude’s later work may not have been seen as seismic as these initial papers. But in the 50s, he demonstrated with basic telephone switches and magnets the underlying ideas of machine learning using a robotic mouse called Theseus who had to navigate a maze (read more here). Illustrated ideas of how to computationally beat chess masters, which is what eventually happened with IBM’s Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov.

It’s a lovely documentary film, which includes reconstructed interviews with Claude that happened in the 80s. Sadly, Shannon died in 2001 from Alzheimer’s, possibly the cruelest of illnesses for such an insightful and intelligent person,

If you’d like to know more about Shannon – then have a read of this paper. The film The Bit Player can be found on several streaming services and YouTube, and the film’s website is here.