Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
These different disciplines sought to apply Shannon's model of
communication, with its concepts of entropy, redundancy and noise
to their own, less technical fields. Shannon himself did not care for
these kinds of applications, and wrote papers explaining the techni-
cal nature of his ideas. Nevertheless it is from Shannon's concept of
information that we owe the idea of information technology and
by extension the information society it helped to bring about.
No such scruples were entertained by Norbert Wiener, one of the
principle developers of Cybernetics, which he intended to be under-
stood as a general theory of, as the subtitle of his topic on the subject
has it, 'control and communication in the animal and machine'
with particular concern for issues of feedback and self-regulation.
Cybernetics incorporated a great deal of thinking about informa-
tion, in much the same terms as those Shannon had proposed, as
well as elements from a number of other disciplines and areas of
interest. During the War Wiener had worked at Bell Laboratories
on an electronic gun-sight system, which would compute and
predict the path of an enemy plane, thus allowing the gun to be
aimed at a probable future location. Wiener's research into concepts
of self-regulation as well as other work investigating the random
behaviour of particles, called Brownian motion, led him to propose
a statistical solution to predicting the plane's path. Like Shannon
he recognized that information was bound up with uncertainty. A
message is made up of a series of individual elements that make no
sense in themselves. Until a message is completed its meaning is
uncertain. Only as the sequence unfolds is its meaning made pro-
gressively clearer. At any one point along the sequence there is
a range of possibilities for what might come next, ranging from
the probable to the improbable (though not the impossible; any
message that violates the basis of communication, by for example
being nonsense, cannot convey any information). Wiener thus de-
veloped a statistical method for estimating the most probable path
taken by a plane, though whether his ideas were actually successful
