Saturday, 23 November 2013

Information


Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is a sequence of symbols that can be interpreted as a message. Information can be recorded as signs, or transmitted as signals. Information is any kind of event that affects the state of a dynamic system that can interpret the information.

Conceptually, information is the message (utterance or expression) being conveyed. Therefore, in a general sense, information is "Knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance", or rather, information is an answer to a question.[citation needed] Information cannot be predicted and resolves uncertainty. The uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that. The more uncertain an event, the more information is required to resolve uncertainty of that event. The amount of information is measured in bits.
Example: information in one "fair" coin flip: log2(2/1) = 1 bit, and in two fair coin flips is log2(4/1) = 2 bits.
The concept that information is the message has different meanings in different contexts.
 Thus the concept of information becomes closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning,understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, representation, and entropy.

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