Information

From ArticleWorld

A clear definition of information cannot be established unless it is made in a theoretical way and it would be the message a sender creates.

The controversy

The very concept of information is so widely used that it has a lot of multiple meanings related to academic, common or technical backgrounds. It is usually associated with the concepts of communication, data, control, knowledge, pattern, perception, representation and many others. In the strict theory of information ellaborated by Claude Shannon, information is the necessary condition for the existence of a message. The concept of message itself also needs inherently a sender , a receiver and a medium of communication . Shannon also provides a mean to measure information . Given a set of N binary, uniform sources, when the receiver chooses a message the quantity of information received is equal to the logarythm of N with the base of 2. This definition can be extended to natural language and more important still to computers. Other fields of science such as biology, cybernetics and physics have different definitions though.

Information seen as pattern

Information can also be seen as any represented pattern. The central additional concept that this definition involves is the existence of a pattern recognition system such as a conscious mind, but it manages to escape the sender/ receiver paradigm. On the other hand this type doesn’t require or provide any accuracy or measurements. Another key concept related to this definition is the concept of representation. For example given a fruit let’s say an apple, a written description of an apple or the sight of a single, certain apple can be considered representations, although they are not necessarily accurate. The practice of assigning a representation to a real object is called encoding, while the extrapolation and understanding ofa a pattern is called decoding.

Information as seen in physics

Physics have their own, distinct, very well defined meaning of what information is. A relevant example is the quantum entaglement. Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light even if transmitted indirectly, this has important applications in experiments of observing entangled relations within a physical system even if the relations themselves are only theoretical and based solely on information. Another concept closely related to information is entropy. Destruction of information cannot be carried out without a proportional increase in entropy, which basically means in more common terms heat emission. This has a huge impact in the study of logical gates and even more important in the construction of quantum computers.