"Waiting for Carnot": information and complexity | Lyn Robinson and David Bawden - Academia.edu
Abstract: The relationship between information and complexity is analysed, by way of a detailed literature analysis. Complexity is a multi‐faceted concept, with no single agreed definition. There are numerous approaches to defining and measuring complexity and organisation, all involving the idea of information. Conceptions of complexity, order, organization and ‘interesting order’ are inextricably intertwined with those of information. Shannon’s formalism captures information’s unpredictable creative contributions to organized complexity; a full understanding of information’s relation to structure and order is still lacking. Conceptual investigations of this topic should enrich the theoretical basis of the information science discipline, and create fruitful links with other disciplines which study the concepts of information and complexity.
#informationtheory #complexity
Arieh Ben-Naim's book is out next week: Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe http:/
Some brief thoughts for a scientific link blog for @wbialek
If you're going to invest the time to collect interesting papers for yourself, a group, or even for the broader public, take a few minutes to think about how to not only most easily collect, but to curate them, make them searchable, and thus make them useful in a longer and broader context.
Depending on your needs and interests, I'd recommend building a link blog on a free broad platform like Wordpress that will let you save the title of the article, the URL, a short synopsis, and then tag it with metadata (categories like physics, chemistry, biology, math, etc. or sub-specific tags like information theory, statistical thermodynamics, etc.), and then broadcast it to various social media sites like Twitter, Google+, and others.
Other options with similar functionality to consider are:
WithKnown https:/
example: http:/
Radio3: http:/
example:http:/
Mendeley: https:/
Given the value I think I'd personally get out of you doing something like this, I'm happy to volunteer some time to build, set up, and simplify the process for you. I'm pretty sure that with a minimum of work, you could have a simple bookmarklet on your webbrowser that would easily allow you to "clip" the article you want, add any quick bits of metadata or tags, and then automatically publish it to one or more of your social media sites automatically, keeping the work to doing it well under a minute while allowing you to easily come back and search, sort, and filter later if you choose.
Response to Quora Question: Are there any popular science books on information theory?
There are a small handful that may meet your requirements:
Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe: What We Know and What We Do Not Know by Arieh Ben-Naim
http:/
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce
http:/
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick
http:/
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes by Charles Seife
http:/
Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
http:/
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd
http:/
The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver
http:/
The Ben-Naim book is coming out at the end of May, and is probably the best popular science book on the topic that you're likely to find (I've read most of an early draft). Following that it's still very hard to beat Pierce's presentation all these years later. Seife wasn't too bad while Gleick comes at things from the most broad viewpoint and covers more history than anything else. Lloyd's book mentions it tangentially. Mitchell's book is excellent, and though it only has one chapter on information theory, some of the other areas it covers are tangential to the subject and very interesting in their own right.
Finally, after Ben-Naim and Robinson, I'd really recommend the UofI Press edition of Shannon/Weaver. Though you can get a copy of Shannon's paper for free online, the introduction by Warren Weaver is really excellent (and similar to Robinson's presentation) and then one can delve into a bit of Shannon's actual math, which isn't too difficult and should be able to be followed by most reasonable high school students. Shannon's text is the only one I've listed that has any mathematical equations, but the Weaver half of the book is certainly a popular science presentation without any math.
Interestingly, Erwin Schrödinger's seminal paper "What is Life?" came out in 1944, almost contemporaneously with the creation of information theory in 1948. Unbeknownst to most Claude Shannon's (the researcher who created the field of information theory and whose Masters thesis literally launched the digital revolution) Ph.D. thesis (1940) was entitled: "An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics," so he could certainly be said to be the god-father of the entire area.
Since then, certainly dozens of researchers have looked at the potential of using information theory to create a better hard core definition of what life really is (certainly the place where any self-respecting Platonist would begin.)
One of the best definitions and frameworks I've seen thus far has to be that of Christoph Adami. To start, and depending on your level of sophistication, take a look at his recent arXiv paper (Information-theoretic considerations concerning the origin of life - http:/
For further references, I maintain a nice list of resources at Information Theory and Biology Resources (http:/
If you really want to blow the top off of your definitions, you might also consider taking a much broader look at the universe (a distant reading, so-to-speak) and read through David Christian's conceptualization (Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History: David Christian, William H. McNeill http:/