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From: bnevin@CCH.BBN.COM (Bruce E. Nevin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: definition of information
Message-ID: <19880609224803.1.NICK@INTERLAKEN.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 9 Jun 88 22:48:00 GMT
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Date: Thu, 9 Jun 88 08:07 EDT
From: Bruce E. Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
Subject: definition of information
To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu
cc: bn@cch.bbn.com

It is often acknowledged that information theory has nothing to say 
about information in the usual sense, as having to do with meaning.
It is only concerned with a statistical measure of the likelihood of
a particular signal sequence with respect to an ensemble of signal
sequences, a metric misleadingly dubbed by Hartley, Shannon, and
others "amount of information".

Can anyone point me to a coherent definition of information respecting
information content, as opposed to merely "quantity of information"?

Bruce Nevin
bn@cch.bbn.com
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