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An Outline of Informational GeneticsAn Overview of Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes

An Outline of Informational Genetics: An Overview of Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes CHAP TER 3 An Overview of Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes 3.1 INTRODUCTION At variance with molecular genetics, I am afraid that popular books dealing with information theory pale in comparison to that of Dawkins’s. Indeed, it is especially difficult to give a fair account of information theory without having recourse to mathematical concepts and notations. For the following rough discussion of information theory, I assume that the reader is reasonably familiar with mathematics at the undergraduate level. In the literature, I often find concepts alleged as belonging to information theory but which engineers do not recognize as such; then, ‘information theory’ is used as a label for topics more or less loosely related to it. I must state that in this lecture I’ll restrict information theory to the science of literal communication, as Shannon expounded it in [72], to its further elaboration and its engineering applications. Other attempts to build information theories were made, some of them rather speculative, but only Shannon’s theory has proved to be both rigorous and fully operational (if we except the algorithmic information theory to be briefly discussed in Sec. 5.4 below). Restricting information theory here to Shannon’s legacy is not attempting to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

An Outline of Informational GeneticsAn Overview of Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2008
ISBN
978-3-031-00501-5
Pages
13 –36
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-01629-5_3
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

CHAP TER 3 An Overview of Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes 3.1 INTRODUCTION At variance with molecular genetics, I am afraid that popular books dealing with information theory pale in comparison to that of Dawkins’s. Indeed, it is especially difficult to give a fair account of information theory without having recourse to mathematical concepts and notations. For the following rough discussion of information theory, I assume that the reader is reasonably familiar with mathematics at the undergraduate level. In the literature, I often find concepts alleged as belonging to information theory but which engineers do not recognize as such; then, ‘information theory’ is used as a label for topics more or less loosely related to it. I must state that in this lecture I’ll restrict information theory to the science of literal communication, as Shannon expounded it in [72], to its further elaboration and its engineering applications. Other attempts to build information theories were made, some of them rather speculative, but only Shannon’s theory has proved to be both rigorous and fully operational (if we except the algorithmic information theory to be briefly discussed in Sec. 5.4 below). Restricting information theory here to Shannon’s legacy is not attempting to

Published: Jan 1, 2008

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