Quote of the Day: Information

[timelets]

To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say.

That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. If one is confronted with a very elementary situation where he has to choose one of two alternatIve messages, then it is arbitrarily said that the information, associated with this situation, is unity.

The concept of information applies not to the indi- vidual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient-to regard as a standard or unit amount.

To be somewhat more definite, the amount of information is defined, in the simplest cases, to be measured by the logarithm of the number of available choices.

-- Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949).

need to think about it in the context of learning by doing.