16 Information theory
As indicated by the references to this section, the development of a theory of the communication of information owes much to the classical work of Hartley and Shannon. The term communication means the passing or transmitting of data from a source to a receiver. In a human context, this implies the passing of messages constructed from an alphabet of symbols within the constraints of a specific language. Since it produces a worst-case situation, it is convenient to consider that the use of each symbol from the alphabet will be independent and equiprobable. Because the number of possible messages expands in an exponential manner with an increase in the number of symbols available, it is useful to use a logarithmic scale to ...
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