Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryInformation Theory

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A fish with wide open mouth and big eyes, Surprised, shocked or amazed face front view

Is Dembski’s Explanatory Filter the Most Widely Used Theory Ever?

It turns out that legions of critics of the Filter use it all the time, without noticing

William Dembski created quite a stir in the world of information theory with his book The Design Inference. For the first time, he outlined a rigorous method for identifying design, which he called the explanatory filter. Since then many critics have claimed that Dembski’s proposed filter is without merit due to the lack of application in the couple of decades since its invention. But, are the critics right, or are they wrong—wrong in the way that a fish doesn’t recognize water because water is the very atmosphere of the fish’s existence? Let us first remind ourselves of Dembski’s explanatory filter. His filter proceeds in three main steps. Eliminate events of large probability (necessity) Eliminate events of medium probability (chance) Specify Read More ›

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3D rendering of technology background

Why is Bell’s Theorem Important for Conservation of Information?

Proving a negative is difficult. Demonstrating that there are no leafy green crows is hard to do without examining every crow. But there's another way.

Proving a negative is difficult. Think about it. For example, demonstrating that there are no leafy green crows is hard to do without exhaustively examining every crow in existence. On the other hand, proving there are no crows naturally emblazoned with the text of the King James Bible is a bit easier to do. Proving a negative is possible if the extremes are large enough. Such as result is known as a no-go theorem. One of the most profound no-go theorems can be found in quantum physics. Physicist John Bell (1928–1990) proved — entirely from first principles — that there is a fundamental difference between how particles interact classically compared with how they interact within quantum physics. In classical physics, Read More ›

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Composite image of digital illustration of pixelated 3d woman

At the Movies: Can AI Restore Blurred Images?

Working with pixels, we can do remarkable things—as long as we are not asking for magic

It’s an exciting scene in crime investigation movies. A critical image, like the one on the left below, is blurred by pixelization. The detective commands the technician, “Sharpen it!” and the technician pushes a key on a computer keyboard. The key activates an algorithm and, magically, the deblurred image on the right appears. That can’t be done in real life. An image cannot be sharpened using only the information in the image itself. This is proven by a mathy theorem called the data processing inequality. 1 The mutual information between an image and a corrupted blurred image cannot be increased by further processing. Period. That’s why the title of a recent news article from Duke University is misleading: “Artificial intelligence Read More ›

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Group of urban runners running on the street in New york city, conceptual series about sport and fitness

Why Information Theory Is Like a Good Run

Information theory can help us understand a wide range of fields besides computers

Information theory is a deep field that is responsible for our modern internet and satellite TV. The field was pioneered by Claude Shannon to measure our ability to communicate meaning. But besides powering the information revolution, information theory is also very widely applicable elsewhere. Once you understand the basic intuition, you can see applications popping up all over the place. To prove the point, I’ll show how we can apply information theory to gain insight in the very low tech world of running. I’ve been running off and on for many years and I’ve noticed that information theory describes a good run. First of all, what is a good run? A good run is when your body feels as if Read More ›

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Coronavirus market crash and financial crisis

COVID-19: When 900 Bytes Shut Down the World

A great physicist warned us, information precedes matter and energy: Bit before it

The COVID-19 virus contains about as much information as a sticker in WhatsApp. Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks and Dr. Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón  explore a dreadful truth:  “Human biology is so finely tuned that less than a kilobyte of information can stop the world.”

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