Description
The article was one of the founding works of the field of information theory. Shannon expanded the ideas of this article in a 1949 book with Warren Weaver titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication (ISBN 0-252-72546-8). The book was released as a paperback in 1963 (ISBN 0-252-72548-4). The article was divided up into 3 levels of communication problems. These problems were: 1) technical, 2) semantic, and 3) influential. First the book briefly explains how the symbols of communication are transmitted, then how the transmitted symbols convey meaning, and lastly the effect of the received meaning. Shannon's article laid out the basic elements of communication:
- An information source that produces a message
- A transmitter that operates on the message to create a signal which can be sent through a channel
- A channel, which is the medium over which the signal, carrying the information that composes the message, is sent
- A receiver, which transforms the signal back into the message intended for delivery
- A destination, which can be a person or a machine, for whom or which the message is intended
It also developed the concepts of information entropy and redundancy, and introduced the term bit as a unit of information.
Read more about this topic: A Mathematical Theory Of Communication
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