The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius, Claude Shannon (the "Father of Information Theory"), who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius, Claude Shannon (the "Father of Information Theory"), who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius, Claude Shannon (the "Father of Information Theory"), who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
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Did you know
- TriviaThe Bit Player was commissioned by the IEEE Information Theory Society, a community of over three thousand academic and industrial researchers and engineers working to further understand the role of information and its impact on modern science and technology.
- Quotes
Michelle: I heard that one of your later papers proved that you could make a reliable circuit from unreliable components. Do you think this might have applications for the brain?
Claude Shannon: [chuckles] I hope so. I mean, the brain can suffer all kinds of damage and still handle things pretty well, which means there must be redundancy. The fact that the brain has ten billion neurons probably means it was cheaper for biology to just make more components that to figure out sophisticated circuits. Trying to work out all the different connections would be astronomical, impossible, but if we can find patterns, well, there may be ways to simplify things.
- ConnectionsReferences The Music Man (1962)
The film is mainly a re-enactment of a series of insightful interviews at Shannon's home during the 1980s. The acting is very fine, especially John Hutton who gives a genuine flavour of how Shannon would have been in his later years. We know this because the interview is inter-cut with snippets of home movies of Shannon riding his many unicycles (whilst juggling), and demonstrating his artificial mouse as it learns to navigate a maze. Background material is supplied by his son and daughter, who clearly loved the intellectual playfulness of their child-father. The technical commentary is finely balanced, giving just enough detail to let the audience know how relevant Shannon's work is to modern information systems.
With regard to the importance of Shannon's work, even though he was not alone in trying to solve one of the key scientific problems of his time (i.e. how to define and measure information), he was alone in being able to produce a complete mathematical theory of information: a theory that might otherwise have taken decades to construct. In effect, Shannon single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid.
A question repeated throughout the film is: Who is Claude Shannon? We should all know who Claude Shannon is. Sadly, because his work did not shorten a war (as far as we know), or involve any other dramatic world events, we are unlikely to see his life made into a movie like The Imitation Game (about Alan Turing). This is a monumental pity. As one commentator said, science fiction books sometimes quote the current year, not as BC, or BP, but AS (After Shannon, who died in 2001). That is how important he should be.
Finally (and this is why I am biased), I think Shannon's theory of information (1948) is simply beautiful.
James V Stone, 27th June, 19 (AS).
- jvstone-48379
- Jun 27, 2020
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- Runtime1 hour 30 minutes
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