Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
“Ahh” the peddler said to himself loudly.
I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with cabbage—that's hard to beat.
Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he'd retrieved from its
hiding place, and added it to the pot. “Capital!” cried the peddler.
You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef as well, and it was fit
for a king.
The village butcher managed to find some salt beef
...
and so it went on until there
was indeed a delicious meal for all (after the stone was removed).
The villagers tried to buy the stone from the peddler but he would have none of it.
After all, how would he feed himself on his travels? So off he went and the villagers
still talk about the wonderful stone soup as being one of the best meals ever.
As for the stone, soup intelligence needs more than just insight and reason (the
stone). It also needs, for example, a purpose. So far the intelligence process as
described has been passive. Signals arrive and these are eventually turned into mes-
sages. What is required of intelligence at this stage is to infer a pattern in the sequence
of messages so that future messages become less.
3.2
Uncertainty
Uncertainty can also be described. It is sometimes known as 'surprise', or 'informa-
tion' and is measured in terms of the average probability of a finite set of messages.
If you can always infer a new message from a string of given messages then such a
message is not surprising, and will contain zero information. If there are many mes-
sages that conform to no conceivable pattern then the information will depend upon
the probability of guessing correctly. The average probability of guessing correctly
is related to a measure of information obtained from a message (see Shannon and
Weaver
1964
). More will be said of this later.
For now we can say that if you have a hypothesis or rule that allows you to make
a more accurate guess at what the next message in a sequence of messages will
be then we can say that the 'information' is reduced, i.e., it is not so surprising.
There are situations where insight (a hypothesis or rule) comes through the process
of experimentation (a validating action) rather than just passive observation of a
sequence of messages. This requires a further stage in the intelligence process in that
an
action
is needed based upon the current observations.
3.3
Selecting an Action
As we have seen, the IQ test does not usually require an action other than a choice or
generation of the next message expected in the sequence of messages (information
source) in order to show that a pattern has been recognised. In general, an action is
