Who is Claude Shannon?

30 Wednesday Aug 2023

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Claude Shannon, Deep Blue, documentary, Information Theory, MIT, The Bit Player

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.

Amazing Documentary on Photo Journalism – Both Uplifting & Tragic

20 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Photography

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Cathy Pearson, documentary, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John G Morris, journalism, photography, programme

I got to watch Cathy Pearson’s tremendous documentary on Photo Journalism called Get The Picture. The documentary’s central narrative is around the life of the Picture Editor John G Morris. The documentary open with John explaining what his role as a Photo Editor was – essentially the guy who commissions photographers, and then chooses the appropriate photos to be used in a publication. This in itself doesn’t sound remarkable until you consider both the publications he has worked for – Life, New York Times, Washington Post and the National Geographic, that’s before you even take into account the his association with the Magnum group. John came to prominence as a Photo Editor during the second world war, and has been involved with Photo Journalism ever since, working with photographers such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson and Werner Bischof and his relationship with these photographers and others also contributed to John’s importance. The relationships weren’t simple employer/employee but relationships grounded on mutual respect and trust and as often as not a common set of goals and values in photo journalism – get the truth out to the public of what is happening and let the picture tell its own story.

The documentary from time to time detours to look at important aspects of photo journalism, particularly the work done in conflicts by journalists – reflecting on what motivates these people to go into such dangerous circumstances, the changing conditions – until the 90s journalists where left alone as the protagonists in a conflict saw journalists as means to get their side of a conflict told and now are as much a target as anyone else because they can show the brutalities of conflict and realities of the acts committed. So you can see why I say tragic, but why uplifting? We John has ben widowed 3 times, but managed to move on and not only find love again but embrace life, and fully appreciate what he has, something that really comes across.

If you have even a passing interest in photography, or world events – this is a very worthwhile documentary to watch. Sadly, not nominated in the Oscar’s Best Documentary Feature category this year – which is a shame as it punches a lot more effective than notable winners such as An Inconvenient Truth. On the happier side it does have some other successes.

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