Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue:
> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”
So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:
> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."
Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia can take that away, as well; but often people notice people with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them in the now.
As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.
I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?
If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis. To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably just incorrect, relatively speaking.
Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion.
Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973."
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were:
Helen Dunmore
The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.
Walter Payton
Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.
Taylor Swift
Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.
Stuart Parkin
Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data
The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.
My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or dead, would you most like to have a meal with?"
My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great.
(Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler...
I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state.
Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.
Intelligence is such a multi-faceted thing that is seems ridiculous to try to reduce it to a single measure and I am highly suspicious of any that tries to do so.
A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels.
It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles.
At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
>EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.
Matter of perspective; one in the 100~150 billion sapiens (or more) that have gone before and the rates go up. It's also possible rates are underestimated, as we have only tested a relatively small sample compared to N=all
If we test every living human, we can figure out who is the very smartest one. That person has a 1-in-<current_pop> intelligence, from which we can calculate their IQ. That IQ is nowhere near 200.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
A difference in 1 IQ point in the 100-101 range might be a difference in absolute problem-solving ability of x units, while than the difference between 170-171 is y units.
It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
Kind of off-topic, but one thing that really confuses me about Shannon's biography is the following: according to the authors of "A Mind at Play", Shannon was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1983 [0], and the illness progressed "very quickly". They continue:
> In too-brief moments, the family was given a flash of the Claude they knew. [His daughter] Peggy remembered that she “actually had a conversation with him in 1992 about graduate school programs and what problems I might pursue. And I remember being just amazed how he could cut to the core of the questions I was thinking about, I was like, ‘Wow, even in his compromised state he still has that ability.’”
So in 1992, an actual meaningful conversation with him seemed to be unexpected, and after 9 years of "quickly progressing" Alzheimer's, I would expect him to be in really terribly shape and barely coherent. Yet there is an article about him from 1992 [1], which shows him at age 75, in good shape, still able to juggle and to hold a conversation about his achievements and about information theory:
> “My first thinking about [information theory]," Shannon said, “was how you best improve information transmission over a noisy channel. This was a specific problem, where you're thinking about a telegraph system or a telephone system. But when you get to thinking about that, you begin to generalize in your head about all these broader applications."
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-did-Claude-Shannon-come-to-terms-w...
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-...
Those examples are ones that can happen without knowing where you are, or who exactly you are currently talking to. Dementia can take that away, as well; but often people notice people with dementia not engaging directly and specifically with them in the now.
As an example, my grandparents would often think I was my father when I would visit them. If I tried to get them to talk to me, as me, expect confusion and nothing to make sense. Let them just talk, though, and what they were saying would make sense. Especially once I realized they were largely taking up a context I just wasn't in.
I wonder, is it possible that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s could be partially masked by being good-natured and very intelligent? Like maybe Alzheimer’s would sort of… drop him into conversations without context, but then he’d work out the context and try to give advice anyway?
Sounds like a good-natured genius's way to handle that kind of scenario to me, FWIW
If he was diagnosed in 1983 and lived until 2001, then he is in the 99th percentile in terms of years of life after diagnosis. To say that his illness progressed "very quickly" is probably just incorrect, relatively speaking.
Brief moments of clarity is pretty common in people with Alzheimer's. Having worked with elder care, there were lots of moments where people who usually didn't speak at all and were mostly confused, suddenly started having conversations and seeming to understand where they were, and then some hours later, being back in the state of utter confusion.
Doesn't surprise me that some of our greater minds of our time would have a similar experience, but with a even stronger contrast.
Quote from Wikipedia: "The Claude E. Shannon Award was established in his honor; he was also its first recipient, in 1973."
That must be a bit awkward to receive a prize named after yourself.
- Turing never won the Turing Award.
- Knuth did, but he never won a Knuth award.
- Dijkstra "kind of" won the Dijkstra Prize: he won the PODC Influential Paper Award, which was renamed after Dijkstra's death to Dijkstra Prize his honour (making the process not awkward).
I was wondering if there were other examples. Google "people who won prizes named after them". The results I got from the "AI Overview" were:
Helen Dunmore The first winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, in 1996 for her novel A Spell of Winter
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch Won the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea. The Booker Prize trophy is named "Iris" after her.
Walter Payton Won the NFL Man of the Year Award in 1977. The award was named after him after his death in 1999.
Taylor Swift Won the Taylor Swift Award at the 2016 BMI Pop Awards, becoming the second artist after Michael Jackson to have an award named after them.
Stuart Parkin Won the Draper Prize in 2024 for developing spintronic devices that allow for cloud storage of large amounts of digital data
The first and last ones are true but irrelevant. The others are legitimate but not exactly what we're talking about here (it turns out that the Taylor Swift Award was just given that one time; it's not like they gave it to her in 2016 and then kept giving it to other people in future years). The Walter Payton case is kind of analogous to the Dijkstra one. The Taylor Swift case would be like the Shannon one if they'd kept giving it out.
Some more fun facts about Claude Shannon, from this New Yorker article (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/claude-s...):
He built a flame-throwing trumpet and a rocket-powered Frisbee. He built a chess-playing automaton that, after its opponent moved, made witty remarks. Inspired by the late artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he designed what was dubbed the Ultimate Machine: flick the switch to “On” and a box opens up; out comes a mechanical hand, which flicks the switch back to “Off” and retreats inside the box.
My favorite fun fact is that, sandwiched between his revolutionary work on circuits and information theory, his actual PhD dissertation was on genetics; like something kind of unrelated to the rest of his life's work and largely forgotten. As a current PhD candidate, I think about that a lot.
Sometimes I can't help but feel like the past had more low hanging fruit for making big discoveries. Not that anything in genetics was particularly low hanging, but discoveries in that field were perhaps more accessible to somebody who had "only" studied it for a few years. Modern breakthroughs nowadays are more likely to require huge teams of people working for a decade or more and needing funding to match.
An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics (1940) -- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5312088 -- https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11174 -- Bear in mind, this was a Mendelian analysis almost 20 years before they worked out that DNA was a sequence of nucleotides.
Ah yes, the "Useless Machine". Fun little thing to build...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
Also Poet: https://cmrr-star.ucsd.edu/static/shannonsite/pdfs/poster.pd...
( maybe following in the footsteps of James Clerk Maxwell https://allpoetry.com/James-Clerk-Maxwell like other Shannon ideas )
Highly recommend giving The Bit Player[0] a watch for those interested in learning more about Claude Shannon and their pursuits in both their academic and personal life.
[0] https://thebitplayer.com/
Loved that film.
I particularly liked the idea that he is one of the most important figures in science/tech/maths that most people have not heard of.
Yeah, along with John von Neumann. I frequently mention those two whenever the icebreaker question "What persons, living or dead, would you most like to have a meal with?"
I'm nearly always met with "Who..??"
My wife worked a bunch on this film, and it's absolutely great. (Among other things, she handles IP requests for the MIT Museum, where much of Shannon's stuff is kept.)
> Ronald Graham, a fellow mathematician-juggler...
I first read about Graham as a friend and collaborator of Paul Erdos in 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers'. As well as his mathematical achievements, Graham was also at one time president of the Internal Jugglers Association. If you have never read the book, it is a fascinating insight into the lives and non-math idiosyncrasies of Erdos and his fellow wizards.
From what I read in The Dream Machine, Shannon sounded like a super cool guy. I love the fact that he talked down the overhype of his own field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972922
I'm still reading it, but apparently he stopped talking to his own mother forever after she refused to give him a cookie intended for guests.
Finally, a human being brave enough to take cookies as seriously as they deserve.
In my experience many mathematicians enjoy things like juggling, change ringing etc. make of it what you will I guess.
Wayback cache url: http://web.archive.org/web/20241108095721/https://www.juggle...
And the paper Shannon wrote (pdf): https://www.jonglage.net/theorie/notation/siteswap-avancee/r...
previous submission 7 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15168016
Our 3.5 friend was named after him.
I honestly thought this was a new Claude model before clicking the link.
One of the photo shows his highly concentration. I have a hypothesis that many world class masters have talent to get into "Flow State". Juggling is one of the activity that associate with the state.
Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
I’ve watched vide with guy that supposedly has 200IQ and in his view IQ is ability to focus on small on small set of things but many high IQ ppl can’t „refocus” it easily and aren’t doing well in life.
Intelligence is such a multi-faceted thing that is seems ridiculous to try to reduce it to a single measure and I am highly suspicious of any that tries to do so.
A 200 IQ is not possible at current population levels.
It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles.
At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
>EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.
That’s why it’ll be a proxy that will get better over time as AI architectures converge towards optimality.
It’s close though. Iq sd is 15. 200 is about 6.7 sd above mean. Odds of being 6.5 standard deviations away is 1 in 12 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
Sure, but we can’t say someone has a 1-in-12B intelligence when we only have 8B (or whatever) people. We can only go as high as 1-in-<current_pop>
Matter of perspective; one in the 100~150 billion sapiens (or more) that have gone before and the rates go up. It's also possible rates are underestimated, as we have only tested a relatively small sample compared to N=all
If we test every living human, we can figure out who is the very smartest one. That person has a 1-in-<current_pop> intelligence, from which we can calculate their IQ. That IQ is nowhere near 200.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
we can compare their intelligence to those who have previously lived?
A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born.
So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
I was thinking along similar lines, bit it becomes a theoretical question when you cannot test/evaluate/interact with subjects anymore.
Also, I'm wondering whether a difference of 1 IQ point is even noticeable, and if not, what's the smallest noticeable increment or faction of a unit.
A difference in 1 IQ point in the 100-101 range might be a difference in absolute problem-solving ability of x units, while than the difference between 170-171 is y units.
It’s funny seeing Shannon as an old man. Yeah, sure, it was a long time ago and everyone gets old. For some reason, in my mind’s eye he is immortalized as the ~35yr old of his prime.
[flagged]
Care to explain that? Apparently, Shannon worked against the Nazis, being contracted by the National Defense Research Committee[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Wartime_researc...