What is Information?
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
2016-03-03 v1 Information Theory
math.IT
Biological Physics
Quantitative Methods
Abstract
Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call "knowledge" is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts "entropy" and "information", while deeply related, are distinct and must be used with care, something that is not always achieved in the literature. In this elementary introduction, the concepts of entropy and information are laid out one by one, explained intuitively, but defined rigorously. I argue that a proper understanding of information in terms of prediction is key to a number of disciplines beyond engineering, such as physics and biology.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1601.06176,
title = {What is Information?},
author = {Christoph Adami},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.06176},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
19 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A