INFORMATION and INFORMATION- CONTENT
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 1655 ▶ |
| Object type | Discipline oriented, General information |
D. Mac KAY states that a problem arises when information is confused with information content, i.e. “the confusion of a thing with a measure of a thing” (1969, p.56).
In his opinion:“Communication engineers have not developed a concept of information at all. They have developed a theory dealing explicitely with only one particular feature or aspect of messages ”carrying“ information — their unexpectedness or surprise value. Unexpectedness is a feature not only of messages but of other things, such as the states of a physical system. Physicists had already developed a quantitative method of measuring unexpectedness: by BOLTZMANN's statistical concept of entropy. What SHANNON and others did was to adopt and extend this method to the measurement of the unexpectedness of messages.
- “Their measure of unexpectedness, the average logarithm of the improbability of the message, is not therefore information, but simply a particular measure of what they termed amount-of-information; (i.e.) the minuteness of the selection which the message makes from the set… of all possible messages”.
- “In this set, the different possible messages are pictured as occupying a space proportional to their relative probabilities, as that the least probable message occupies the smallest space and requires the most minute selective operation” (p.57).