Anyone who has studied science and engineering may know Shannon. The second law of thermodynamics will be involved in the course of college physics, so the concept of entropy will be involved. Shannon is an American mathematician and the founder of information theory. His first most important formula is about information entropy.
Material, energy and information are the three elements that make up the objective world. There is no accepted definition of information. Usually, the meaningful content in a message is called information. So, can information be measured?
Shannon's answer is: Yes. Shannon pointed out that when we know nothing about a problem, our understanding of it is uncertain. In the process of understanding the problem, we obtain information through various channels and gradually eliminate the uncertainty. The more information we get, the more uncertainty we eliminate. We can measure the amount of information by eliminating uncertainty.
For example, the auditorium has 20 rows with 20 seats in each row. Find someone.
A tells The Paper that this person is in row 10;
B Tell The Paper that this person is in row 10, and the seat is 10.
The uncertainty of the messages of Party A and Party B is different, so the information content is also different. B has the smallest uncertainty and the largest information. So can we use mathematics to quantitatively measure this amount of information?
1948, Shannon pointed out in his paper entitled Mathematical Theory of Communication that "information is used to eliminate random uncertainty". Shannon applied the knowledge of probability theory and logical method to derive the calculation formula of information quantity.
Compared with McCarthy, Shannon is about ten years older than them on average and is already the boss of Bell Labs. In addition, McCarthy and Minsky both work for Shannon in Bell Laboratories. Shannon attended the meeting mainly under the banner of McCarthy, made of tiger skin, and was invited to play soy sauce at the meeting.
However, Shannon's own contribution to artificial intelligence should not be underestimated.
1950 wrote an article for Scientific American, expounding "the realization method of man-machine game"; In the same year, the chess program he designed was published in the paper "Writing Computer Programs for Chess".
1956, at the MANIAC computer conference in Los Alamos, he showed the chess program. It can be said that Shannon's chess program is the veritable originator of the later famous "Deep Blue".
In the process of developing the chess program, Shannon spent a lot of time studying chess. Playing chess makes Shannon very happy. Later, in response to an interview with a reporter, he said, "I often do things in my own interests, and I don't pay much attention to their ultimate value, nor do I care about the value of this matter to the world. I spent a lot of time on purely useless things. " But this inaction made his boss "a little unhappy", but he was embarrassed to stop Citron, which was already a big cow in the industry at that time.
1952, Shannon made an "artificial intelligence" mouse "Shannon Mouse" that can learn to walk a maze by itself, which is probably the prototype of the first artificial intelligence device.
196 1 year, Shannon made the world's first hidden wearable computer to challenge the casinos in Las Vegas.
So it is no exaggeration to say that he is the pioneer of artificial intelligence.