Blog 4 (9/19-9/21)
For class this week we talked about the signal to noise ratio. Signal is the thing that you want to hear while noise is the noise that you don’t want to hear and keeps you from fully hearing the signal. We then talked about Alan Turing, imitation game, and the Turing device test for machine intelligence. I found it really interesting that he would judge the intelligence of a machine based off of external ability to do something, with disregard to any internal creativity. I agree a lot with John Searal who commented on the Turing test and said that it was not a legit test because someone had to program the machine in order to do the things that it does, and so the person is intelligent, not the machine.
Next we talked about Claude Shannon and The Mathematical Theory of Communication. This theory is the key to his work and says that the meaning of a message is not important when transmitting it, and that everything is just information strung together to make meaning. This differentiation between meaning and information is extremely important and is used in search engines. His main goal was transmitting messages with the least amount of noise. This system led into binary codes, which I find to be fascinating. Binary means that all information can be turned into either yes or no questions at their most simple form. By starting off at the simplest units, you can layer yes and no answers to form complex answers, images, messages, etc. He also was interested in music as being a means of information as apposed to messages. I like this way of look at things because it shows that things are not all technical or emotion. I would argue that most things in our lives have an information component and a meaning component.
In addition to these things we also talked about the Cold War, as well as WWII. During these wars Analog computers were created and gave way to things such as ENIAC, Arpanet, and the internet (Tim Berners-Lee). We talked about how the internet in a lot of ways was created to survive the Cold War and how it was a successful tool for America because of its culture, compared to the Russian/Soviet culture. The internet created a place where information flows freely across large distances even when a place is destroyed. Furthermore, the concept of the information not being able to be destroyed is important during war times, and changes the information landscape in general for the world.