CYBR650 Week 7
“The stone
age was marked by man’s clever use of crude tools; the information age, to
date, has been marked by man’s crude use of clever tools.”-Author Unknown
The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to
think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to
remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that
knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is
the first essential step to all of these.
Arthur C. Clarke
April
30th marks the 100th birthday of Claude
Shannon, credited with being the father of the information age. So who is this person who gets this kind of
title, but was unknown to me until I saw today’s
Google Doodle?
Born in 1916, Shannon
was a mathematician and an electrical engineer.
The most significant work that Shannon did was his master’s thesis
called “A
Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” which described a new mathematical
way to analyze and design circuits rather than the trial-and-error method of
the day. This came from his work at MIT trying
to build an analog computer. It worked,
but took a week to solve a simple equation.
He discovered little known Boolean algebra
and expanded on it to describe digital circuits. His work, explained in the thesis, is the basis
of all digital circuits such as microprocessors. A chart of boolean circuits, used in all digital electronics, is displayed here.
Some
consider his paper written 8 years later, while he worked at Bell Laboratories
in 1948, called “A
Mathematical Theory of Communication” more important. It presented the founding work of information
theory, which studies the transmission, processing and extraction of information
on a highly theoretical level. It is the
basis of cryptography, artificial intelligence complexity science and
informatics. It has more to do with
probability than data. While this theory
is quite complex, its where the concept of the binary digit, or bit, was
defined by Shannon which can be used to describe any information such as a song
or picture. The transistor was invented at
Bell Laboratories that same year.
One
really interesting aspect of his life is his design of a wearable computer he used
to beat
Las Vegas casinos at Blackjack with professional gambler Edward O. Thorpe. The money they won was invested using the
same theoretical basis in probability to beat the stock market, and Shannon
didn’t need to work for the rest of his life.
He invented a lot of things but didn’t have any further impact on the
world. He died at age 87 suffering from
severe dementia, so he never saw the results of his work that we call the Internet.
This
post doesn’t specifically address anything directly related to security, but we
wouldn’t be actively working in the information age and using the Internet
without his work.
Picture
credit: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/worksheets/boolean-algebra/
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