Claude Shannon

The universe speaks in the language of mathematics and information.

Every interaction is an exchange of information.

The quest for understanding is what drives us forward.

The beauty of a theory lies in its simplicity and explanatory power.

Our existence is a continuous stream of information processing.

The more we understand information, the more we understand ourselves.

The capacity of a noisy channel is the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over the channel with arbitrarily small error probability.

It is possible to send information at a rate approaching the channel capacity with arbitrarily small error probability.

The significant aspect is not the meaning of the individual symbols but the statistical properties of the ensemble of messages.

The problem of communication is not to transmit meaning, but to transmit symbols.

The amount of information is measured by the reduction of uncertainty.

A device for playing chess, if it is to play well, must be able to 'think' several moves ahead.

The machine will be able to play a fairly respectable game of chess, certainly better than the average player.

The machine can be said to 'learn' if its performance improves with experience.

The problem of designing a machine to play chess is not one of finding a perfect algorithm, but of finding a good heuristic.

The most important thing is to have a good problem.

I'm not interested in whether a machine can think, but whether a machine can do something useful.

Information is not meaning.

The mathematical theory of communication is essentially a branch of applied probability theory.

The problem of cryptography is essentially the problem of making a message unintelligible to anyone but the intended receiver.