Sending Information Across Time and Space

This post is something I've wanted to accomplish for a while, on a topic that fascinates me.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's information model describes an information source, a transmitter, a signal, noise, the received signal, a receiver, and a destination. It's the basis of almost all modern information theory. Some people refer to it as "the mother of all models".

Shannon and Weaver give us a definition of information. Others have expanded on it. Shannon himself disagreed with some scholars who associated his concept of entropy in information science too closely with the use of entropy in thermodynamics. If you really want to hurt your brain, consider Schrödinger's concept of negentropy as life itself.

There is, I believe, a lack of clarity on the intertwined roles of communication and information, and I think that examples (such as this video) serve to demonstrate the relationship.

Communication moves information across time and space.
Without information, communication has nothing to move.
Without communication, information is trapped where it is.

Years ago I'd seen a movie called The Black Robe. There was a scene in the movie which really excited me, to the puzzlement of my companions who they didn't see what the big deal was. For me, this scene gave a real-world example of Shannon and Weaver's information model, and shows how communication and information are interwoven.



The background story is that a group of Native Americans are escorting a French missionary to a remote outpost. Along the way, they teach each other a few lessons.


I've come to have this video through the efforts of my son's friend Jon, who edited the scene out of another YouTube and reformatted it for me. Thanks Jon!

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Previously, the movie shown below had been my favorite video example of communicating a message across a channel in the presence of noise:

Two-Bit Players Communicating Via Signs

This is, to me, one of the most effective demonstrations of Shannon and Weaver's Theory of Communications, which discusses transmission of information through a channel in the presence of noise:

Shannon and Weaver's information model describes an information source, a transmitter, a signal, noise, the received signal, a receiver, and a destination. It's the basis of almost all modern information theory.

Claude Shannon went on to offer a quantification of information in units he called "bits", binary digits. Our modern discussion of gigs and megs are just multiples of Shannon's bits.

We can calculate the bits of information exchanged by the two characters via their notes using this formula:


The messages they exchanged are, "take a photo im kidding stacey jason nice 2 meet u nice 2 meet u 2 i have a secret i was watching u first do u want to meet i got promoted we should celebrate absolutely do u want to meet thought youd never ask hi". (For the purpose of this discussion, we're avoiding the images: the tictactoe, the torso, the face.)

A string length of 215 characters, in a 27-character set, conveys 27^215 bits of information, or 5.5361684267445E+307 bits, or 5.53 * 10^307 bits. Less than a googolplex.

Romantics and non-engineers might say, Oh No! To limit our understanding of their communications to just their text signals is so inappropriate! You lose all the nuance and texture!

Of course, it is a gross oversimplification to say that all of their communication was across the channel of their signs - they saw each other, they exchanged non-verbal signals, they laughed, etc. Her signaling with a mirror was a clear communication. A lot more information than 5.53 * 10^307 bits was communicated between them.

For the calculation to be valid, the only communication between them would have been the messages. Where would we see such an artificial exchange? In telegraph- or email-mediated correspondence, which is to say: text messaging. Does anybody believe that the movie would have ended the same way if they had only communicated via text messages?

Which, thank you, brings me to my point about communicating via text messages and email. It's not nearly as effective to text/email somebody as it is to speak to them, and it's not nearly as effective to speak/phone somebody as it is to meet with them.

So, we start with a love story, we middle with Shannon's calculation of bits over a narrow channel, and we end with a generalization: it's more effective to meet people than to exchange text messages with them.

I'd like to thank Chris Briem of Nullspace for pointing me to http://infosthetics.com, where I found this movie. It really is fascinating from an information theory point of view.