Claude Shannon
April 30th 1916 - February 24th 2001 |
Professor Emeritus Claude Shannon of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, considered the pre-eminent researcher of his era into
information theory, died on Saturday. After suffering from Alzheimer's
disease for years, he died aged 84 at a Massachusetts nursing home.
A distant relative of Thomas Edison, his childhood interest in science
led him to study mathematics and electrical engineering at the
University of Michigan. By the time he earned his doctorate in 1940,
he had already earned the Alfred Noble Prize of the combined
engineering societies of the United States for his masters thesis on
the application of symbolic logic to switching and computer circuits.
Soon afterwards, the United States entered the Second World War.
Shannon worked at the Bell Laboratories as a cryptographer working on secrecy systems which were used in anti-aircraft directors. Over the
next ten years he released a number of extremely influential papers.
In 1948, his paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", was the first to contemplate communicating messages by converting the
information content within them into a number of 1s and 0s, whatever
the form of the message. His theory is fundamental in computer storage of images and data transfer today.
His 1949 paper, "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", related
cryptography to communication in a noisy channel. Applications of
this range from sending data down telephone lines to managing a
portfolio of investments in the Stock Market.
The world of mind sports owes its greatest debt to Shannon for his
founding work in artificial intelligence and computer game programming.
His 1950 paper, "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", introduced three search strategies which form the basis of computer chess
algorithms still in use today.
His work earned him invitations to lecture all around the world,
including a trip to Russia in 1965. One fellow electrical engineer
in attendance was Mikhail Botvinnik, for many years World Chess
Champion. The two attempted to discuss elementary computer chess
but insufficiently expert interpreters made communication difficult.
His pioneering work was recognised over the years, resulting in
invitation as guest of honour to the 1980 International Computer
Chess Championship in Linz, Austria.
He also was responsible for other machine learning techniques that
two generations of programmers have built upon. In 1950, he
built Theseus, the original magnetic mouse which could move around
a maze and learn the directions of the passageways within, thus
eventually learning to solve the maze from any position.
Another primitive computer mind sport of his was the "mind reading"
machine which played a penny-matching game by predicting whether
man would choose to place a coin head uppermost or tail uppermost.
The machine took advantage of human inability to generate fully
random strings of numbers to win more than half the time.
His incredible creativity also showed through a number of fun
scientific inventions: a motorized pogo stick, a rocket-powered
Frisbee, a device which would solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle and
a machine featureless apart from a single switch. Flicking the
switch would cause a buzzing noise from the machine, until a hand
emerged from within the case of the machine, turned the switch
back off and retreated back into the case to stop the buzzing.
Among the many awards earned by his considerable body of work were
the Kyoto Prize for Basic Science and the National Medal of Science.
He is survived by his widow, a son and a daughter, two granddaughters,
and a sister.
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