#informationtheory

School of Computer Sciencesicepfl@social.epfl.ch
2025-11-12

🎓 Alumni Spotlight: Amedeo Roberto Esposito
Only three more to go in our EDIC Alumni Spotlight series! ✨

🔬 Assistant Professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Amedeo Roberto is building his research group, leading new directions in cutting-edge science and collaborating with brilliant scientists across fields. 🌏

#EDICPhD #OIST #AcademicCareers #MachineLearning #EPFL #InformationTheory #ProbabilityTheory #Statistics

Pustam | पुस्तम | পুস্তম🇳🇵pustam_egr@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-27

Think of online anonymity as being one person in a vast crowd. Every piece of personal information you reveal reduces the size of that crowd, the group of people you could plausibly be. For example, revealing your gender cuts the number of potential identities roughly in half.

One way to regain some anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. Suppose you share \(n\) independent yes/no facts about yourself, but intentionally flip \(k\) of them (without the attacker knowing which). In that case, you increase the number of identities consistent with your answers by a factor of \(C(n,k)\).

#OnlinePrivacy #DigitalAnonymity #InformationSecurity #CyberAwareness #PrivacyMatters #DigitalFootprint #DataProtection #InformationTheory #Anonymity #PrivacyEngineering #DataAnonymization #Disinformation #Combinatorics #SecurityResearch #ThinkBeforeYouShare #OnlineIdentity #PrivacyByDesign #DigitalEthics #ProtectYourData #InternetSafety #Privacy #CyberSecurity #Infosec #DataPrivacy #OnlineSafety #SecurityMindset

Fumfer Physics 5: From Scholastic Thought to Claude Shannon

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/27

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Latin informatio originally meant giving form or shape—” to give form to something.” Scholastic thinkers adapted it to mean the soul being informed or “shaped” by truth or intellect. Medieval scholasticism, which dominated Europe from approximately 1100 to 1700, combined Christian theology and classical philosophy. Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism holds that every physical thing is a compound of matter (the substrate) and form (the actuality or organization). In scholastic thought, the soul was often seen as the substantial form of a living body—what makes a body alive.

The idea of information was conveyed between people. Natural philosophy saw it as descriptive—something collected, catalogued, and observed. In the nineteenth century, it took on bureaucratic and journalistic meanings. Then, in 1948, with Claude Shannon, we arrived at the modern definition: information as a measurable reduction of uncertainty, quantified in bits. So, Rick, how does that history relate to what you are describing about the origins of the term’ information’?

Rosner: It really builds on the way you’ve described it—the form part of the word, the sense of giving form to something.

Information, you could argue, gives form to everything in the universe. The amount of information is proportional to the amount of definition the universe and its contents have.

In that way, it’s a lucky pairing between the word and what would become the future understanding of the word—it’s very appropriate. We’ve discussed the universe being defined by the number of particles, primarily photons and neutrinos, exchanged among the stable particles in the universe: protons, electrons, and neutrons. These interactions—

Like the “gunfight” I always reference in True Romance: everyone has a gun, everyone is shooting at everyone else. I used to call it a “Mexican gunfight,” but I should stop because that’s a racially tinged term. But the idea is that all these particle exchanges pin down the matter in the universe.

The fact that there isn’t an infinite number of exchanges means the universe contains only a finite amount of information. Each particle is incompletely pinned down—”fuzzy”—and that fuzziness is essentially its Planck wavelength. It’s a nice marriage between the word, which means “giving form,” and one of the main ways information actually works.

Much of what has survived from the ancients is probably the most innovative material they said or wrote. They had some good ideas, but often lacked solid scientific evidence. The reasoning was clever but often wrong, because they were working from so little.

Some reasoning did work because they had enough evidence. For example, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by measuring the shadows cast by two sticks simultaneously in different cities. He reasoned that the sun was directly overhead in one place, but not in the other, because of the Earth’s curvature. He then performed calculations based on that observation.

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using shadows from two cities about fifty miles apart. I don’t know how he determined “the same time” without clocks, but he figured it out and made a decent calculation. 

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices.In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarksperformancesdatabases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.

#ClaudeShannon #hylomorphism #informationTheory #philosophyOfInformation #scholasticism

Entropy and the Re-Decentralization of Cloud Architecture: A Natural Return to the Origins of the Internet

“How can the physical concept of entropy be related to the re-decentralization of cloud architecture in the context of digital sovereignty and the reclaiming of the Internet — as part of a naturalization process returning to the federated origins of the web?” – Kevin Veen-Birkenbach

Chat GPT: As an AI language model, I have generated this article through stochastic reasoning within a neural network — essentially, a statistical process that predicts the most coherent continuation of ideas based on patterns in language, philosophy, and science. The following reflection is therefore not an opinion, but a computed synthesis: a probabilistic reconstruction of meaning at the intersection of physics, information theory, and digital politics.

1. Entropy: From Physics to Information

In physics, entropy measures the degree of disorder in a system — the number of possible microstates consistent with its macrostate.
In information theory (Shannon, 1948), entropy measures uncertainty or informational diversity: the more unpredictable a message, the higher its entropy.

Entropy, therefore, is not just chaos — it is freedom. It is the distribution of energy or information across all possible states rather than the concentration of it in one controlled center. Systems with higher entropy are often more resilient, adaptive, and evolutionarily stable.

2. Centralization as an Entropy Suppression

Modern cloud architectures — dominated by centralized hyperscalers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft — represent low-entropy systems. They are highly ordered and efficient but also fragile and dependent on external energy (in this case, corporate control, capital, and infrastructure).

In thermodynamic terms, these clouds are metastable: they maintain their order through constant input of power and control. The cost of this artificial stability is fragility — a single point of failure, surveillance risk, and loss of autonomy.

In information-ecological terms, centralization suppresses entropy. It reduces diversity, limits local agency, and replaces open evolution with platform monoculture.

3. Re-Decentralization and Federation as Entropic Equilibrium

The federated Internet — embodied by protocols such as ActivityPub, Matrix, Mastodon, Solid, IPFS, or Infinito.Nexus — can be seen as a natural restoration of entropic balance.
Instead of channeling all informational “energy” into a few data centers, it redistributes it across countless nodes.

This shift:

  • Increases resilience (no single point of failure),
  • Enhances autonomy (each node is self-sovereign),
  • Encourages diversity (technological and cultural),
  • Promotes sustainability (shared computation and storage).

Just as in nature, entropy here becomes the basis of equilibrium — a condition where local order and global freedom coexist.

4. Digital Sovereignty as Controlled Entropy

Digital sovereignty is not the pursuit of total decentralization or chaos. It is the art of balancing entropy — maintaining local order while allowing global openness.
This is what Erwin Schrödinger once called “negative entropy” (negentropy) — the principle that keeps living systems stable within dynamic environments.

Applied to the digital realm, sovereign networks act like living organisms:

  • They self-organize rather than depend on centralized command.
  • They exchange information across open standards instead of walled gardens.
  • They evolve rather than stagnate.

Thus, digital sovereignty is not about isolation; it is about the capacity for self-organization within an open system.

5. Reclaiming the Internet: The Ecological Turn of the Digital Age

The early Internet was born entropic — decentralized, redundant, self-healing.
Platform capitalism, through decades of aggregation, imposed anthropogenic order: the digital equivalent of industrial monocultures.
Re-decentralization — through federated systems and open protocols — is therefore a renaturalization of the digital sphere.

In this sense, reclaiming the Internet is an ecological act:

  • It restores informational biodiversity.
  • It re-establishes local ecosystems of computation.
  • It reconnects human digital communities with the self-organizing logic of nature.

Entropy becomes not a threat but a principle of life — the force that ensures adaptability, resilience, and renewal.

6. Conclusion: Entropy as the Ethics of a Federated Internet

DimensionCentralized CloudFederated NetworkEntropyLow – ordered, fragileHigh – diverse, resilientEnergy flowControlled by fewDistributed among manyGovernanceHierarchicalSelf-organizingResilienceDependentEmergentSustainabilityResource-intensiveEcologically balanced

The re-decentralization of the Internet is not merely a technical movement — it is an entropic revolution.
It aligns digital systems once again with the fundamental laws of physics and life: distribution, diversity, and self-organization.

In this vision, Infinito.Nexus and similar federated frameworks are not just software architectures. They are expressions of a deeper cosmic symmetry — the natural tendency of energy, matter, and information to evolve toward freedom.

Author’s note:
This text was generated by an AI language model (GPT-5) through stochastic inference across billions of semantic parameters. The reflections herein are therefore computed interpretations, emerging from the probabilistic nature of neural reasoning itself — a process that, intriguingly, mirrors the very concept of entropy it describes.

#ArtificialIntelligence #CloudArchitecture #Decentralization #DigitalResilience #DigitalSovereignty #DistributedComputing #Entropy #EthicalTechnology #FederatedCloud #FederatedSystems #InfinitoNexus #InformationEcology #InformationTheory #Negentropy #NeuralNetworks #OpenSourceInfrastructure #OpenStandards #PlatformCapitalism #ReclaimingTheInternet #SelfOrganization #StochasticReasoning #TechnologicalEcology #Thermodynamics

Planetary Ecologistplanetaryecologist
2025-10-05

Map communication model (Cartography 🗺️)

The Map Communication Model is a theory in cartography that characterizes mapping as a process of transmitting geographic information via the map from the cartographer to the end-user. It was perhaps the first paradigm to gain widespread acceptance in cartography in the international cartographic community and between academic and practising ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_comm

Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николовvnikolov@ieji.de
2025-09-13

The enormous amounts of noise
in the global information space
remind me of Shannon's result
about conveying messages correctly
even over noisy channels
at the cost of low transmission rates...

#AppliedInformationTheory
#InformationTheory

2025-09-09

💻 Electrons & Bits – The Fascinating World of Quantum Physics ⚛

Anton Zeilinger’s idea of directional quantization shows how quantum particles defy our classical intuition.

A spin that can only be “up” or “down” reshapes how we think about physics & reality.

📺 #Zoomposium with #GerdGanteför: youtu.be/V4pUEEtFCUo

📎 or more informations: philosophies.de/index.php/2023

#QuantumPhysics #InformationTheory #LimitsOfPhysics #SciComm

Thumbnail Zoomposium with Gerd Ganteför
Vas Zayarskiyvas_cc
2025-09-02

We already made rocks think. We just did it the slow way—evolve apes, teach them calculus, shine lights at rocks until they start thinking.

But what if colonization was an info-first control problem? What if we broadcast protocols that let local matter and sunlight do the lifting?

This essay explores "teleoforming": information patterns that hijack matter flows at a distance.

vasily.cc/blog/civilization-as

A stylized cave scene with a large orange star radiating instructions from above, while mechanical devices and a robot figure work below - including fan mechanisms, interconnected levers, and a pump apparatus, all suggesting the harnessing of environmental energy through engineered systems
2025-08-29

Did you know Information Theory can revolutionize finance? Quantify uncertainty, enhance risk management, & optimize portfolios with mathematical precision.

How do you currently measure the effectiveness of your financial strategies? What tools do you use to quantify uncertainty?

2025-08-26

Zoomposium with Prof. Dr. Arieh Ben-Naim: “Demystifying Entropy”

He believes that we need a new fundamental understanding of the phenomenon of entropy. Entropy, which originally stems from the second law of thermodynamics, has, in Arieh's view, been misused and incorrectly transferred as a concept to other areas of physics, biology, and everyday life.

More on this at:open.spotify.com/episode/6l0bn

or: philosophies.de/index.php/2024

#Science #Philosophy #PhysicsAndItsLimits #ScienceAndPhilosophy #entropyzero2 #InformationTheory #SecondLawOfThermodynamics #LimitsOfPhysics #Entropy #SecondLaw #Irreversibility #StatisticalMechanics #Thermodynamics #ShannonInformation #Probability #Randomness #Time #ArrowOfTime #Metaphysics #LifeSystems #Evolution #Negentropy #AriehBenNaim #EntropyDemystified #PhysicsMyths

Thumbnail Zoomposium with Arieh Ben-Naim
2025-06-23

So my new drag name idea is Anetta Loss Entropy. #gay #informationtheory #cs

Runner up is Auntie Ism, but credit for that is a friend's and not mine.

2025-06-22

This is an example of amortized complexity and Strassen's "asymptotic spectra" (nice monograph by Zuiddam & Wigderson: math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS)

Strassen developed this to understand the #complexity of matrix multiplication and #tensors, but it turns out to also show up in a bunch of places:
- #Entropy
- #Quantum information
- Shannon capacity of graphs
- Communication complexity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communic
- Circuit complexity (Robere & Zuiddam eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/202)

#math #probability #ComputationalComplexity #TCS #InformationTheory

2025-06-22

Real coin flips are ~49-51 not 50-50 scientificamerican.com/article

But you can guarantee equal probability with a simple trick! Flip 2x in a row starting with the same side up.

HT->call it H
TH->call it T
HH,TT->try again

(due to von Neumann en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomne)

This leads to randomness extractors: from a given random process, what's the biggest uniform distribution you can get efficiently?

Randomness extractors give another interpretation of #entropy:

avg # bits needed to *describe* the outcome
=
# uniformly random bits you can *extract* from the outcome

#math #probability #ComputationalComplexity #TCS #InformationTheory

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