What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  Fire control and cryptography aside, Shannon had been pursuing this haze of ideas all through the war. Living alone in a Greenwich Village apartment, he seldom socialized with his colleagues, who mainly worked now in the New Jersey headquarters, while Shannon preferred the old West Street hulk. He did not have to explain himself. His war work got him deferred from military service and the deferment continued after the war ended. Bell Labs was a rigorously male enterprise, but in wartime the computing group, especially, badly needed competent staff and began hiring women, among them Betty Moore, who had grown up on Staten Island. It was like a typing pool for math majors, she thought. After a year she was promoted to the microwave research group, in the former Nabisco building—the “cracker factory”—across West Street from the main building. The group designed tubes on the second floor and built them on the first floor and every so often Claude wandered over to visit. He and Betty began dating in 1948 and married early in 1949. Just then he was the scientist everyone was talking about.

  THE WEST STREET HEADQUARTERS OF BELL LABORATORIES, WITH TRAINS OF THE HIGH LINE RUNNING THROUGH

  Few libraries carried The Bell System Technical Journal, so researchers heard about “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” the traditional way, by word of mouth, and obtained copies the traditional way, by writing directly to the author for an offprint. Many scientists used preprinted postcards for such requests, and these arrived in growing volume over the next year. Not everyone understood the paper. The mathematics was difficult for many engineers, and mathematicians meanwhile lacked the engineering context. But Warren Weaver, the director of natural sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation uptown, was already telling his president that Shannon had done for communication theory “what Gibbs did for physical chemistry.”♦ Weaver had headed the government’s applied mathematics research during the war, supervising the fire-control project as well as nascent work in electronic calculating machines. In 1949 he wrote up an appreciative and not too technical essay about Shannon’s theory for Scientific American, and late that year the two pieces—Weaver’s essay and Shannon’s monograph—were published together as a book, now titled with a grander first word The Mathematical Theory of Communication. To John Robinson Pierce, the Bell Labs engineer who had been watching the simultaneous gestation of the transistor and Shannon’s paper, it was the latter that “came as a bomb, and something of a delayed action bomb.”♦

  Where a layman might have said that the fundamental problem of communication is to make oneself understood—to convey meaning—Shannon set the stage differently:

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

  “Point” was a carefully chosen word: the origin and destination of a message could be separated in space or in time; information storage, as in a phonograph record, counts as a communication. Meanwhile, the message is not created; it is selected. It is a choice. It might be a card dealt from a deck, or three decimal digits chosen from the thousand possibilities, or a combination of words from a fixed code book. He could hardly overlook meaning altogether, so he dressed it with a scientist’s definition and then showed it the door:

  Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

  Nonetheless, as Weaver took pains to explain, this was not a narrow view of communication. On the contrary, it was all-encompassing: “not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.” Nonhuman as well: why should machines not have messages to send?

  Shannon’s model for communication fit a simple diagram—essentially the same diagram, by no coincidence, as in his secret cryptography paper.

  (Illustration credit 7.3)

  A communication system must contain the following elements:

  The information source is the person or machine generating the message, which may be simply a sequence of characters, as in a telegraph or teletype, or may be expressed mathematically as functions—f(x, y, t)—of time and other variables. In a complex example like color television, the components are three functions in a three-dimensional continuum, Shannon noted.

  The transmitter “operates on the message in some way”—that is, encodes the message—to produce a suitable signal. A telephone converts sound pressure into analog electric current. A telegraph encodes characters in dots, dashes, and spaces. More complex messages may be sampled, compressed, quantized, and interleaved.

  The channel: “merely the medium used to transmit the signal.”

  The receiver inverts the operation of the transmitter. It decodes the message, or reconstructs it from the signal.

  The destination “is the person (or thing)” at the other end.

  In the case of ordinary speech, these elements are the speaker’s brain, the speaker’s vocal cords, the air, the listener’s ear, and the listener’s brain.

  As prominent as the other elements in Shannon’s diagram—because for an engineer it is inescapable—is a box labeled “Noise Source.” This covers everything that corrupts the signal, predictably or unpredictably: unwanted additions, plain errors, random disturbances, static, “atmospherics,” interference, and distortion. An unruly family under any circumstances, and Shannon had two different types of systems to deal with, continuous and discrete. In a discrete system, message and signal take the form of individual detached symbols, such as characters or digits or dots and dashes. Telegraphy notwithstanding, continuous systems of waves and functions were the ones facing electrical engineers every day. Every engineer, when asked to push more information through a channel, knew what to do: boost the power. Over long distances, however, this approach was failing, because amplifying a signal again and again leads to a crippling buildup of noise.

  Shannon sidestepped this problem by treating the signal as a string of discrete symbols. Now, instead of boosting the power, a sender can overcome noise by using extra symbols for error correction—just as an African drummer makes himself understood across long distances, not by banging the drums harder, but by expanding the verbosity of his discourse. Shannon considered the discrete case to be more fundamental in a mathematical sense as well. And he was considering another point: that treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines.

  So back he went to the telegraph. Analyzed precisely, the telegraph did not use a language with just two symbols, dot and dash. In the real world telegraphers used dot (one unit of “line closed” and one unit of “line open”), dash (three units, say, of line closed and one unit of line open), and also two distinct spaces: a letter space (typically three units of line open) and a longer space separating words (six units of line open). These four symbols have unequal status and probability. For example, a space can never follow another space, whereas a dot or dash can follow anything. Shannon expressed this in terms of states. The system has two states: in one, a space was the previous symbol and only a dot or dash is allowed, and the state then changes; in the other, any symbol is allowed, and the state changes only if a space is transmitted. He illustrated this as a graph:

  (Illustration credit 7.4)

  This was far from a simple, binary system of encoding. Nonetheless Shannon showed how to derive the correct equations for information content and channel capacity. More important, he focused on the effect of the statistical structure of the language of the message. The very existence of this structure—the greater frequency of e than q, of th than xp, and so forth—allows for a saving of time or channel capacity.

  This is already done to a limited extent in telegraphy by using the shortest channel sequence, a dot, for the most common English letter E; while the infrequent letters, Q, X, Z are represente
d by longer sequences of dots and dashes. This idea is carried still further in certain commercial codes where common words and phrases are represented by four- or five-letter code groups with a considerable saving in average time. The standardized greeting and anniversary telegrams now in use extend this to the point of encoding a sentence or two into a relatively short sequence of numbers.♦

  To illuminate the structure of the message Shannon turned to some methodology and language from the physics of stochastic processes, from Brownian motion to stellar dynamics. (He cited a landmark 1943 paper by the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in Reviews of Modern Physics.♦) A stochastic process is neither deterministic (the next event can be calculated with certainty) nor random (the next event is totally free). It is governed by a set of probabilities. Each event has a probability that depends on the state of the system and perhaps also on its previous history. If for event we substitute symbol, then a natural written language like English or Chinese is a stochastic process. So is digitized speech; so is a television signal.

  Looking more deeply, Shannon examined statistical structure in terms of how much of a message influences the probability of the next symbol. The answer could be none: each symbol has its own probability but does not depend on what came before. This is the first-order case. In the second-order case, the probability of each symbol depends on the symbol immediately before, but not on any others. Then each two-character combination, or digram, has its own probability: th greater than xp, in English. In the third-order case, one looks at trigrams, and so forth. Beyond that, in ordinary text, it makes sense to look at the level of words rather than individual characters, and many types of statistical facts come into play. Immediately after the word yellow, some words have a higher probability than usual and others virtually zero. After the word an, words beginning with consonants become exceedingly rare. If the letter u ends a word, the word is probably you. If two consecutive letters are the same, they are probably ll, ee, ss, or oo. And structure can extend over long distances: in a message containing the word cow, even after many other characters intervene, the word cow is relatively likely to occur again. As is the word horse. A message, as Shannon saw, can behave like a dynamical system whose future course is conditioned by its past history.

  To illustrate the differences between these different orders of structure, he wrote down—computed, really—a series of “approximations” of English text. He used an alphabet of twenty-seven characters, the letters plus a space between words, and generated strings of characters with the help of a table of random numbers. (These he drew from a book newly published for such purposes by Cambridge University Press: 100,000 digits for three shillings nine pence, and the authors “have furnished a guarantee of the random arrangement.”♦) Even with random numbers presupplied, working out the sequences was painstaking. The sample texts looked like this:

  “Zero-order approximation”—that is, random characters, no structure or correlations.

  XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ

  FFJEYVKCQSGHYD GPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJGD.

  First order—each character is independent of the rest, but the frequencies are those expected in English: more e’s and t’s, fewer z’s and j’s, and the word lengths look realistic.

  OCRO HLI RGWR NIMILWIS EU LL NBNESEBYA

  TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL.

  Second order—the frequencies of each character match English and so also do the frequencies of each digram, or letter pair. (Shannon found the necessary statistics in tables constructed for use by code breakers.♦ The most common digram in English is th, with a frequency of 168 per thousand words, followed by he, an, re, and er. Quite a few digrams have zero frequency.)

  ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN

  D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY

  TOBESEACE CTISBE.

  Third order—trigram structure.

  IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID

  PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS

  REGOACTIONA OF CRE.

  First-order word approximation.

  REPRESENTING AND SPEEDILY IS AN GOOD APT OR COME CAN

  DIFFERENT NATURAL HERE HE THE A IN CAME THE TO

  OF TO EXPERT GRAY COME TO FURNISHES THE LINE MESSAGE HAD

  BE THESE.

  Second-order word approximation—now pairs of words appear in the expected frequency, so we do not see “a in” or “to of.”

  THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH

  WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OF THIS POINT IS

  THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT

  THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN

  UNEXPECTED.

  These sequences increasingly “look” like English. Less subjectively, it turns out that touch typists can handle them with increasing speed—another indication of the ways people unconsciously internalize a language’s statistical structure.

  Shannon could have produced further approximations, given enough time, but the labor involved was becoming enormous. The point was to represent a message as the outcome of a process that generated events with discrete probabilities. Then what could be said about the amount of information, or the rate at which information is generated? For each event, the possible choices each have a known probability (represented as p1, p2, p3, and so on). Shannon wanted to define the measure of information (represented as H) as the measure of uncertainty: “of how much ‘choice’ is involved in the selection of the event or of how uncertain we are of the outcome.”♦ The probabilities might be the same or different, but generally more choices meant more uncertainty—more information. Choices might be broken down into successive choices, with their own probabilities, and the probabilities had to be additive; for example, the probability of a particular digram should be a weighted sum of the probabilities of the individual symbols. When those probabilities were equal, the amount of information conveyed by each symbol was simply the logarithm of the number of possible symbols—Nyquist and Hartley’s formula:

  H = n log s

  For the more realistic case, Shannon reached an elegant solution to the problem of how to measure information as a function of probabilities—an equation that summed the probabilities with a logarithmic weighting (base 2 was most convenient). It is the average logarithm of the improbability of the message; in effect, a measure of unexpectedness:

  H = −Σ pi log2pi

  where pi is the probability of each message. He declared that we would be seeing this again and again: that quantities of this form “play a central role in information theory as measures of information, choice, and uncertainty.” Indeed, H is ubiquitous, conventionally called the entropy of a message, or the Shannon entropy, or, simply, the information.

  A new unit of measure was needed. Shannon said: “The resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits.”♦ As the smallest possible quantity of information, a bit represents the amount of uncertainty that exists in the flipping of a coin. The coin toss makes a choice between two possibilities of equal likelihood: in this case p1 and p2 each equal ½; the base 2 logarithm of ½ is −1; so H = 1 bit. A single character chosen randomly from an alphabet of 32 conveys more information: 5 bits, to be exact, because there are 32 possible messages and the logarithm of 32 is 5. A string of 1,000 such characters carries 5,000 bits—not just by simple multiplication, but because the amount of information represents the amount of uncertainty: the number of possible choices. With 1,000 characters in a 32-character alphabet, there are 321000 possible messages, and the logarithm of that number is 5,000.

  This is where the statistical structure of natural languages reenters the picture. If the thousand-character message is known to be English text, the number of possible messages is smaller—much smaller. Looking at correlations extending over eight letters, Shannon estimated that English has a built-in redundancy of about 50 percent: that each new character of a message conveys not 5 bits but only about 2.3. Considering longer
-range statistical effects, at the level of sentences and paragraphs, he raised that estimate to 75 percent—warning, however, that such estimates become “more erratic and uncertain, and they depend more critically on the type of text involved.”♦ One way to measure redundancy was crudely empirical: carry out a psychology test with a human subject. This method “exploits the fact that anyone speaking a language possesses, implicitly, an enormous knowledge of the statistics of the language.”

  Familiarity with the words, idioms, clichés and grammar enables him to fill in missing or incorrect letters in proof-reading, or to complete an unfinished phrase in conversation.

  He might have said “her,” because in point of fact his test subject was his wife, Betty. He pulled a book from the shelf (it was a Raymond Chandler detective novel, Pickup on Noon Street), put his finger on a short passage at random, and asked Betty to start guessing the letter, then the next letter, then the next. The more text she saw, of course, the better her chances of guessing right. After “A SMALL OBLONG READING LAMP ON THE” she got the next letter wrong. But once she knew it was D, she had no trouble guessing the next three letters. Shannon observed, “The errors, as would be expected, occur most frequently at the beginning of words and syllables where the line of thought has more possibility of branching out.”