EECS CSPL SEMINAR SERIES
WINTER TERM 2000
Mark R. Titchener
Dr. Mark R. Titchener
Centre for Image Technology and Robotics
Department of Computer Science
University of Auckland, New Zealand
mark@tcode.tcs.auckland.ac.nz
Thursday, April 13
4:00 - 5:00 P.M.
Room 1001 EECS
Towards a scientific theory of information
Abstract-
Modern information theory is founded principally on the work
of Shannon, who provided a probabilistic framework for
information, justified largely in terms of the
reasonableness of its implications. Nevertheless,
probabilities are not physical quantities that can be
measured, like mass, distance, or energy, but a mathematical
notion applied in the modeling of complex physical systems
in such a way as to abstract out the underlying mechanisms
and processes. However, Cherry provides an interpretation of
Shannon's entropy which allows us to move out of a
probabilistic framework into a counting domain. In this
talk, I introduce a recursive hierarchical pattern copying
(RHPC) algorithm, and infer from experimental results a
direct relationship between the number of RHPC steps
required to construct a string and its information content.
The result is a theory directly applicable to individual
strings and useful in the practical investigation of
information structures and processes.
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