Alan Kay's Voice Echoed Back 21 Seconds Late, and He Turned It Into a Lesson on Shannon
Alan Kay: Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels [video]
During a live Zoom talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100th birthday, Alan Kay's own voice kept returning to his ears about 21 seconds late, thanks to an open mic near a speaker. Instead of ignoring it, he riffed on Claude Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem — the very math describing the garbled channel he was praising. Commenters compare the accident to Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room."
Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels. I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing.
- MarkusWandel
Did he though? TMK Shannon did specifically not give a way to deal with noisy channels, no. He invented a way to quantify what could be sent on a noisy channel if you figure out the optimal way to do it. This is very similar to "no matter what you figure out about faster travel, you can't go faster than light in a vacuum".
Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.
- wood_spirit
Aha i saw this video in a comment on another HN thread this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791117 Avoiding the babbling-idiot failure in a time-triggered communication system
- aworks
Alvin Lucier wrote other highly interesting, if unconventional works, although similar to John Cage's 4'33", this is the one that achieved meme status as conceptual art.