A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Rob Goodman

Claude Shannon was smart and introduced the information age. He had worked much in industry and pioneered ideas useful for transmitting information across phone networks. He helped understand the redundancy of data and how information can be compressed, error corrected and used to communicate across distances. It was a very practical field with some rigourous underpinnings. He was also a "character" with interesting social skills. He married his first wife because they liked the same music. He had general "I understand the world better than traditionalists" outlook.  I had a read a few Shannon books before, and didn't realize I had actually read this one before. This one felt a bit slow.

A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play deifies Claude Shannon as a renaissance-type genius who is able to make contributions to any field he desires, yet is likely to leave his greatest ideas unfinished. You would have a tough time finding any criticism in this work. He grew up a tinkerer in small-town Michigan. He was super smart, and was great at understanding and applying math. He was also able to pick up domain knowledge of other fields and made great contributions to genetics research (that were only recently "rediscovered"). However, his primary contribution was the theory of information transmission. Alas, only briefly discusses what this theory is, leaving us wondering why he is so important. (Though this may be in part because it seems so obvious today.) He made some of the earliest "thinking machines", such as a "maze running mouse" and chess computers. He lived to see the dawn of the information age, but was suffering from Alzheimer's at the time and was thus barely able to comprehend it.
While I found the book to be a excessively laudatory, I did enjoy the descriptions of the time at Bell Labs. Having a bunch of people turned lose at doing whatever they wanted seems to be one of the advantages of monopolies. Any research that could be tangentially related to phone company business was fair game. The huge number of innovations that arose from Bell Labs validates its value. Imagine if we allowed more researchers the freedom to investigate ideas rather than spend endless hours writing grant proposals or helping the companies short-term bottom line? We see some of that with the big tech companies like Google and Facebook these days. Alas, a lot of the innovation today is in the small startups, and that funding is driven by the ability to appease the venture capitalists.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The history of information can be a broad topic. Even narrowing it down to "modern" advances in uses of information still leads a lot to cover. This book focuses on the technology and theory that have changed the way that we process process and transfer information. Speech enabled more verbose communication to be shared among people. Different aspects of the language were used to communicate stories over time. Epics like the Iliad relied on a number of verbal clues to allow the bards to relate the tale.

Then came the revolution of writing. This enabled greater spreading of language across time and space. It also lead to a decrease in the abilities of the oral story-tellers. In the process, it also changed the way that we think about the world. Different means were used to record speech, including pictographs, syllabaries and alphabets.

The telegraph was one of the first modern technological advancements that enabled widespread communication. However, this in essence simply mirrored African drummers that were able to "talk" with their drums over great distances. Telegraphs required translation of speech into a digital code of "dots, dashes, short pauses and long pauses". Associated with this codes were different additional codes to "encrypt" and "compress" the information via codebooks or other shorthand phrases.

The telephone started to allow communication with analog signals. This set off a revolution where everybody could use the long-distance communicator without an intermediary. From there, the information revolution took off into high gear and never really stopped, with computers, internet and more enabling rapid communication.

This book covers all the communication and the theory behind it. Information theory, mathematics, biology, computer science and more are all covered. It even "jumps the shark" to talk about "jumping the shark". With a topic as broad as "information" it is easy to meander into all sorts of different areas from DNA to the Enigma machine. A little more focus would have been helpful. At times it can get awfully boring as the author rambles on about some topic. Then it can turn around an start to cover something interesting.