Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA23741 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 17 Jan 2001 15:13:06 GMT Message-Id: <200101171510.KAA01500@mail0.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 09:16:08 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia? In-reply-to: <A4400389479FD3118C9400508B0FF230010D1A43@DELTA.newhouse.akzonobel.nl> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: "Gatherer, D. (Derek)" <D.Gatherer@organon.nhe.akzonobel.nl>
To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia?
Date sent: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 15:58:32 +0100
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Vincent:
> Or, in other words, what kind of information could be bereft of
> meaning?
> Derek:
> In information theory, informational entropy is defined as H =
> sigma(-xlog2x) where x is the frequency of a token, symbol or event. A
> random series of n events (or a gibberish text of n symbols) will have high
> informational entropy H as all xs will be near enough 1/n. Where one or
> more symbols are overrepresented relative to the others, or the series of
> events are not random, the value of H will be smaller. You can therefore
> predict if a phenomenon is likely to contain information without knowing its
> meaning. Thus a message from an extraterrestrial civilisation might be
> recognisable as such without having a clue as to what it is about.
>
In other words, meaningless gibberish is incompressible.
>
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