Jacob Ward
speaker
135 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Jacob Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the other crucial part of that is information.
If you're going to have these feedback loops, you want to make sure that there's a really clear signal of information being transmitted as part of that feedback.
And both Shannon and Veena, actually, as part of their work during World War II, come up with mathematical theories that define what information is.
They're both trying to figure out, can you calculate mathematically how much information a message has?
Wiener, it's part of his anti-aircraft gunnery research.
For Shannon, it's part of his encryption and cryptography research.
And so the interesting thing about their theories is they're almost exactly identical, except Shannon's definition of information is...
the opposite of Wiener's.
So Wiener says, well, you know, the more predictable, the more clear a message is, the more information it has, which seems completely logical.
Shannon says the less predictable, the more chaotic and messy and disordered a message is, the more information it has, which seems completely unintuitive.
But if you think about it from the perspective of code breaking, Shannon was working on a system called Sigsley, also known as the mysterious Project X. He was working on it with people like Alan Turing.
And it was to have an encrypted communications line between the allies.
It was used by people like Roosevelt and Churchill and Eisenhower.
And if you think about information from a code breaking perspective...
If you can perfectly predict a message, if you know what Churchill is going to send to Eisenhower, you don't need to spend any effort on breaking it.
You don't get any new information by breaking the code.
But if the message, the encrypted message, appears completely random, then you can't predict what they're saying.
It's very hard to break the code.
And if you do break the code, you get a lot more information.
So that's this completely unintuitive definition of information that he has.
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